Intimidation of journalists working for independent media in Albania is getting worse, as state-level and local officials attempt to silence critical voices, both online and face-to-face.
When journalist Armando Rabi was covering the voting in the May general election in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokaster, he saw civil servants acting suspiciously at a polling station – hanging around closer than electoral legislation allows.
But when he identified himself as a journalist and started to film them, an unknown person threatened and then assaulted him. His assailant was “an individual who was accompanying a public official”, he said.
It was not the only such attack on journalists during the election that officials either instigated, or failed to prevent. When an MCN TV correspondent, Elsa Xhindole, was reporting at a polling station in Pogradec, a town beside Lake Ohrid, she claims an unknown individual seized her phone.
“While I was inside the voting centre, an unidentified person grabbed my phone and deleted the material I had filmed,” Xhindole said. Officials did nothing to stop it, she added.
The recently-published OSCE/ODIHR election observers’ report on the May polls noted several cases of intimidation and obstruction of journalists.
This year, the media freedom organsation Safe Journalists has registered 36 attacks on journalists in Albania, many of them working in small communities with few ways to protect themselves.
Journalists in Albania are under growing pressure from hostile rhetoric towards the media in a highly polarised political environment. Moreover, the insults come from senior politicians as well, including Prime Minister Edi Rama and the mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj.
Rama has spoken of a “political-media swamp”, while Veliaj, after being arrested on corruption charges in February, described journalists as “dogs”.
The media freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders, in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, noted that journalists in Albania are subjected to intimidation by both politicians and organised crime groups. The problem is compounded by “a flawed legal framework and partisan regulation”, it said.
The situation is worse in small communities. There, local journalists and opposition voices face coordinated harassment, often with no institutional protection. It all points to a deepening crisis for press freedom in Albania and to the normalisation of intimidation as a tool to silence dissent.