By Dritan Hila
Even though elections for Tirana are just around the corner, Albania’s opposition still doesn’t have a candidate.
Two months of protests in front of City Hall, seven months with Erion Veliaj in prison, and now only two months left until the next elections—in other words, nearly a full year has passed, and this opposition still doesn’t know what it wanted to achieve from the day it started standing outside the municipality’s doors. Eleven months later, and they have no idea why they began this whole charade or how they plan to end it.
Meanwhile, the vacant seat at City Hall has only encouraged all sorts of fools and megalomaniacs—many from PD’s own ranks, but not only—to throw themselves forward as “opposition candidates.”
The whole spectacle reveals the opposition’s utter lack of organization. They have no strategy, no leadership, no structure.
Berisha is a shadow of his former self. Instead of thinking about victory, he is busy trying to keep together what’s left of what we once called the Democratic Party, which today has nothing left but its logo.
And if in Tirana the opposition is in pieces, in other cities it’s not even worth mentioning—no names, let alone a strategy.
Practically speaking, the country is without an opposition. What we still call “the opposition” is nothing more than a limited liability company: in some places it exists to secure financial benefits, in others to save the leader from jail. The new factions are no different from the old ones—just scaled down to one-tenth.
Two months before elections, the opposition doesn’t even have six candidates lined up for the country’s municipalities. They try to dress this up as a “democratic selection process,” but in reality it’s chaos. The same chaos they had in 2021, in 2025—elections where, once again, candidates and district coordinators were appointed only in the final month, while their opponents had been on the ground working for a year. The result? Predictable. A fourth consecutive defeat.
And the outcome this time doesn’t require a fortune-teller either.
Today, Albania effectively has no opposition. You cannot call it that—a body that once contested to govern the country, but today seems satisfied with six lost municipalities that not even Google Maps bothers to mark. And then they wonder why passengers abandon their bus and jump onto the other one. It doesn’t take much brains to realize that when the only thing working on your vehicle is the horn, you’re not going anywhere. That’s why some hop on Rama’s bus, while others set off on foot. At least they won’t crash together with a group that looks less like a political party and more like an emergency room, where everyone screams about their own pain and there’s no doctor in sight to treat them.