The new names appearing on the lists of deputies running for each party in June’s elections arouse the public’s curiosity. After the exhaustion felt by the current political class and given the young age of these new candidates, there are high hopes that something good could happen. Have these young people earned their trust to become future leaders in politics? First of all, it must be highlighted that those young candidate deputies may be passionate about politics, but not about the election game, because their names have been handpicked by the party’s leader. They have not participated in a previous competition phase and haven’t consulted with their party’s forums.
Last week in Opinion, five main parties were represented by new faces who were on their lists. They engaged in a political debate, which for the electoral moment and the emotional weight carried on a TV studio, was rather challenging. Since the opening minutes, it became easy to understand that the party’s prep work for the televised confrontation focused on reciting the values of their parties, but especially on highlighting the figure of their leader. Can the young electorate really be represented this way? Springing from a personal preference of the party’s leader they transformed into copycats that lost their original values. Furthermore, the age of these young candidates enrolled is ever more concerning for the future values and contributions.
Despite them being young, what can a twenty-year-old girl, who is a student and doesn’t have her first wage in bank, do for her electorate? Klejdi Mehmeti could be considered a successful model, but lots of them have been used for their age and image to become part of lists and what not, they have become simple copies or with time chose another path. Even in countries with a more established democracy it is hard to find a deputy that is twenty years old, even when they are heirs in families of politicians they are meticulous and they engage in politics only after developing professionally.
The tendency to enroll young candidate deputies just to tell Albanians that they will represented by fresh faces will most probably fail. Youth party forums are the “laboratories” where politically successful young people are in a position to rival the party’s leader and create new models, without keeping to others’ expectations. Albania has had thirty-year-old ministers and prime ministers, who have considered the confrontation with their party’s leader their biggest challenge. But the near future doesn’t promise a young class of politicians that is ready and able to confront challenges, while “the elders” of politics remind us that they are still the bosses who run things.
