70 rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. had in impacting the country’s political culture and as result its democratization trajectory, as compared to its post-communist experiences (Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017). Actually, the former had strongly impacted the later, especially in the first decade of transition. As I have argued elsewhere, there were particularly four factors that held back Albania’s successful democratization, namely its totalitarian past, a weak political & institutional culture, a clientelistic and fragmented economy not able to withstand the international market pressures and last but not least, the absence of rule of law due to widespread corruption in the judiciary, which normally would serve to correct the executive and legislative excesses (Kalemaj 2017). One of the factors that had most impact were the elite struggles, manifested through constant and bitter political clashes. This political warfare has kept the institutional reform in limbo, the economy in hands of oligarchs who have direct access and support from political power and little chance for national consensus even when it comes to agreeing in essential and national agendas, such as reforms to speed up the European integration or constitutional and electoral changes that would improve the general election infrastructure. It is still a puzzle to explain the internal political behavior of Albania, given that on the other hand it escaped unscathed from conflicts in neighboring former Yugoslavia, it has an ethnic homogeneity which meant that it did not have to deal with nation-building like a lot of other CEE countries and excellent natural and human resources to have a jump start in the aftermath of communism. The lack of progress is further reflected in the fact that it has not yet opened the negotiating chapters with EU five years after signing the candidate status, while it took both Serbia and Montenegro only two years each to accomplish this process. Albania currently is in possibly worst political stand-off of the post-communist era, with Albanian opposition parties walking out of the parliament and burning their mandates, after accusing the government of stealing the last elections through usage of drug-trafficking money. The government on the other hand, plans to enter the June 2019 elections like nothing has happened and the country is torn between the two camps, while protests take place routinely. Thus, we may safely conclude that different from CEE countries, such as Romania or Estonia, Albania’s democracy is far from fully maturing and reaching the stage of democratic consolidation and meagre adoption and lack of full implementation of transitional justice measures played a big part of it.