After the unconstitutional election of the Temporary General Prosecutor – an election actively “guaranteed” by two foreign Ambassadors who were supposed to represent different, democratic values, silently tolerated by those other Ambassadors who claim to not have an opinion on the matter, and legitimated by the embarrassed silence of many who should have understood the concept of democracy by now – the Albanian public is waiting to understand what will happen now.
The issue is not at all simple.
On the one hand it is now clear to everyone that Prime Minister Edi Rama has decided to play the game of personal power by any means. Having paralyzed the appointments of the High Prosecutorial Council (KLP) and the High Judicial Council (KLGj), and having appointed his personal Temporary General Prosecutor (even as the latter filled the Prosecution Office with her own closest persons), Rama will now try to pretend that he has started implementing a reform that, in reality, is getting lost in its own complexity and the opposition against it coming from the entire Albanian political and administrative body.
At the same time, Rama has begun constructing a new narrative, one that attributes all responsibility for the potential failure to open EU accession negotiations to the opposition. Convincing the people of this will likely be very easy thanks to the extraordinary concentration of power in his hands and the consequent “tsunami” of unbridled servility in all of the country’s intermediate bodies, particularly the media.
However, even such a “success” would not solve the problem, because finding a culprit would still not provide a solution. These propaganda-facilitated manipulations can only resolve the internal problem, which has become totally negligible, nonetheless, as we are now operating in an openly monistic context.
Any petty conflict among oligarchs only marks a series of repositionings within the prime-ministerial court, but no one will be able to intervene and really combat the causes for an increasingly paralyzed economy. The wait for foreign investments will become longer than the wait for the opening of EU accession negotiations.
The “One Billion” plan will continue to occupy the pages of newspapers and the fanciful declarations of the Minister of Finance, but the few proposals, if there will be any, will futilely wander the banking world in search of that one thing that is always missing, including in Albanian oligarchs: money.
The flight of the Albanian population will become an increasingly more evident phenomenon, especially in the middle-upper class of the population, the one that has the aspirations and intellectual instruments to insert itself everywhere, and, in a country that has its suitcases in hand, it will be progressively difficult to increase consumption, let alone income.
And now, we come to the opposition. First, we should identify it in an objective way: in a monist system, who can be defined as being of the opposition?
If we use the term in its normal Western sense, the opposition is the set of parliamentary parties and extra-parliamentary political movements that manifestly do not agree with the government’s political and administrative actions. That would be the PD, the LSI, and a handful of (nearly) family parties who have survived mutations, alterations, congresses, and some parliamentary or even governmental mandate.
Each of their leaders should interpret the part of the incorruptible leader who proposes recipes to save the country from corruption, abuse of power, monopolistic oligarchy, the gradual and insistent penetration of organized crime in the economy and in society, by proposing legal, electoral, constitutional, economic, and social reforms to give citizens the hope of building a better future. However, the reality is that their credibility, with the exception of none, has been inexorably consumed by the recent political past, and the final proof of that is precisely the fact that none of them are able to call the people to the square.
A perspective of parliamentary opposition, with legislative proposals and debates, does not seem credible given the parliamentary numbers of the Socialist Party and its expressed willingness not to leave any room for adversaries. Even the recent parliamentary skirmishes have shown the impracticality of the parliamentary road, which would only lead to some fanfare, many expulsions and electoral votes lost as a result. How, then, can one discuss rules of common life, if the basic rule itself, the one that defines the rules of the political game, the Constitution, has been blatantly and continuously violated, with the blessing of international representatives, nonetheless?
So, then, no popular demonstrations, no Parliament, and presumably not even foreign embassies. All useless, untrustworthy, not functional. Then all of today’s opposition leaders – whose predecessors were considered superheroes even as they greatly damaged society – will wait, complaining and playing the victim, for an unlikely electoral turn, that will have to be achieved by the rules dictated by absolute power, which means that it will inevitably lead to a ridiculous result that is easily predicted even now.
An endless tunnel for the successors of superheroes who have not inherited their powers, leaders without leadership abilities.
Still, the opposition in Albania can not be traced back to just a handful of self-proclaimed leaders, unrecognizable political professionals, and anyone who knows how to listen can understand that the popular discontent with the country’s leadership is reaching alarming levels, as witnessed by the many attempts at immigration.
The idiotic arrogance demonstrated by the intermediate levels of the state administration, their abuses and daily extortions to the detriment of simple and politically defenseless citizens, in clear contrast to the favors reserved for the great state thieves and friends of power, will soon create a another type of opposition – one that is typical of dictatorships and well known also in Albania: a passive resistance, whispered dissent, a creeping boycott and nonparticipation that will slowly end up paralyzing the entire society.
This is in fact the current reality: the organized political opposition does not work, not to say that it does not even exist. Instead, there is widespread popular dissatisfaction that extends to every new initiative of a government only somehow legitimized by very questionable votes, that has slipped into a strategy of domination with no return.
Only a deep understanding of the social situation and a sincere approach toward the problems of the people and the country, with repeated proofs of humility, can create the conditions for the disgruntled crowd to become a political entity, and for a normal character to become charismatic (or at least credible) enough to be identified by the people as a potential leader of the opposition: only then can the era of superheroes end forever and that of democratic dialectics begin.
