From: Karl Kuçi
“The Empty Square” and the Arrogance of the State

Saturday the opposition organized another protest. Its peaceful and civilized nature refuted the fear of the foreign embassies. Two thousand police forces and three thousand volunteers of the PD were standing to the side, because the quietness of the day was not provoked by any incident, no matter how small.

But soon others turned into provocateurs. Because they had been prepared for a violent and antidemocratic protest that didn’t happen, the machinery of the socialist propaganda switched to plan B.

Also this was a well-organized scheme furnished with drone footage filmed before Lulzim Basha had begun his speech, spreading the fake news that the boulevard was basically empty. Even photoshop manipulations weren’t shunned.

In reality there were a lot of people, maybe not as many as on February 18, but still several ten thousands of people had assembled on the boulevard. It is true that toward the end of the boulevard there were quite some open spaces, but different from February 18 people stayed on the pavement underneath the trees, owing to the high temperatures.

Several thousand people more or less has little political importance, but the government had only one goal: to propagate that the Democrats had abandoned their leadership.

In fact, their propaganda machine had this false argument ready, and when reality failed to match it, they preferred to falsify reality rather than change their argument.

The argument that could be found on pro-government websites on Sunday was that no one had showed up for the protest. So the people had abandoned the opposition, opposed the decision to boycott the elections, and the electorate of the opposition will vote during the elections for the parties that registered at the KQZ.

In other words, the government is preparing to bring also the voters of the opposition out to vote. Their votes will certainly be distributed among other parties, the fake opposition, with made-up and worthless candidate lists, which otherwise would be of no particular importance.

The only goals here is to justify to the world that the elections and the parliament that results from it, finally subduing the role of the current opposition and showing that in the end the crisis was all made up and that the old leaders of the opposition were simply afraid of the vetting and no longer wanted by the entire Albanian people, irrespective of political preferences.

Just like the dozens of declarations to the media and the international community for months on end that there was no cannabis problem in Albania and that the police had nothing to do with it, which were denied by the daily experience of the population and now even by the new Minister of Interior Fatmir Xhafaj, Edi Rama continues to deny the reality that everyone has in front of their eyes by construing fake evidence in order to justify his election results of tomorrow.

And the interesting fact is that again this method seems to work for the Prime Minister, thus creating the basis for a future repetition, perhaps again with the silent collaboration of the international representatives in the country.