Opinion
Resignations kept in a drawer are not meritocracy
More than 130 agency directors resigned within a single day on the prime minister's orders. An administration judged by undated letters does not get better; it gets more dependent.
By ANN Newsroom · Newsroom
October 23, 2026, 18:30 · Updated 18:39 · 2 min read
On Thursday Prime Minister Edi Rama asked his ministers to have the directors of state agencies in Tirana and in the districts resign. On Friday morning he gathered the ministers and the political leaders of the Socialist Party (PS) on the issue, and according to government sources cited by Top Channel, more than 130 officials handed in their letters in less than 24 hours. Among them are the head of Customs, Besmir Beja, the head of Taxes, Ilir Binaj, and the director of the National Business Center, Etugert Llazi.
The stated goal, meritocracy in the administration, is right. No one should keep a state post simply because they once got it. But the method raises questions. According to the same sources, the resignations are merely logged, the directors stay in their posts, and only afterward is each one's work assessed. That means hundreds of heads of institutions are now working with a resignation letter sitting in someone else's drawer.
For Customs and Taxes, this is no detail. Institutions that collect public money should be as far as possible from political pressure, not dependent on a decision that can be taken at any moment. And when that decision is discussed at a meeting also attended by the ruling party's political leaders, the line between state and party becomes blurrier. The government has yet to comment officially.
There is also a simpler question: similar mass requests were made in 2021 and 2023. If the reviews back then had worked, a third wave would not be needed. The criticism applies to this government, but it would apply just as much to any other government that used this tool: an administration cannot be rewritten every two years by a verbal order.
Our proposal: the new minister of public administration, Adea Pirdeni, should publish within a set deadline the evaluation criteria, who applies them, and the outcome for each institution. Resignations should be accepted or returned within that deadline, not held undated. And for the heads of Customs and Taxes, Parliament should consider open competition and fixed terms, so that replacing them comes with written reasons, not just a request of the day.
