Has anything truly changed after the tragic death of the two children in Durrës? Listen to the terrifying roar of motorcycles and the frantic honking of cars through our cities, the accidents, the reckless violations, and you will have your answer.
By Ben Andoni
Has anything changed in the discourse of the opposition and in the way real public concerns are addressed? The answer lies in the language of communication used by Mr. Berisha and the others. Has the cult surrounding Mr. Rama weakened, along with public concern over the stagnation and disorder consuming so many aspects of the country? The answer is found in our everyday reality and in the chaos the average Albanian encounters daily. Is Kosovo changing in any meaningful way with the alignment of former President Vjosa Osmani with the LDK? One wonders, considering that a president with excellent legal training, who signed countless documents into decree, had many of them overturned by Kosovo’s Constitutional Court, revealing her more as a notary of Mr. Kurti’s government — a government she now attacks with full political rhetoric.
What, then, should Albanians in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and beyond truly believe in regarding their respective states? Why does the state increasingly appear unequal toward its own citizens? Why did Kosovo’s transitional Prime Minister Kurti appear so calm alongside Mickoski? Why is the Democratic Party incapable of holding normal internal elections, instead turning aggressively against anyone who dares suggest they are acting wrongly? Why is wealth not distributed through a more inclusive logic in Kosovo and Albania, states governed by Albanians themselves? There are no answers.
One indicator illustrating this reality is what is happening in Albania regarding the distribution of bank deposits. Around 7% of the population — approximately 12,000 individuals — control more than 93% of total deposit assets. This reveals an extremely deep divide between a minority accumulating capital and the rest left with the scraps. Wealth taxation and other corrective mechanisms fail to reduce inequality effectively, allowing capital to grow much faster than wages. Add to this the inequality of the labor market: the vast gap in income reflects a system where only a small minority work in highly productive sectors, while over one-fifth of the population at the bottom of the pyramid manages to gather only around 7.5% of national income. If one adds the concentration of assets to this equation, the social polarization becomes even more tangible.
And yet, it is equally true that Albania, thanks also to favorable European historical circumstances, is steadily moving toward integration. Nevertheless, when one listens to the discourse of the leading politicians of both camps — especially Rama and Berisha — it is deeply unsettling. Politics is attempting to eclipse everything with its own protagonism.
“The whole world was horrified! ‘Negotiations were blocked,’ ‘negotiations were blocked,’ ‘Germany left,’ ‘Germany entered.’ How do we explain this? First of all, we explain it by speaking with you, and then you speaking with everyone else. People are focused on this issue because they want us to achieve what they gave us all that support for: to make the European Union passport a reality for every Albanian. And for that, we need strength,” Prime Minister Rama declared some time ago.
There is no need even to mention the mountain of insults directed at him by the opposition leader, nor the reduction of European integration into partisan theater.
This entire technical road toward integration faces one immense internal challenge: the “healing” of hope. Our deepest wound — the one to which we continuously surrender. If we imagine society as a pyramid, then if we no longer believe in anything positive, how can we possibly transform ourselves, our society, and the very system we have built?
The greatest barrier is fatalism, which follows the Albanian individual everywhere. Reality constantly feeds it: poor public services, mass emigration, unbearable prices, the privileged position of businesses that begin modestly and somehow rise spectacularly, and the diminishing weight of the ordinary citizen. For anthropologists, Albanian fatalism — something repeatedly expressed throughout the century-long existence of the Albanian state — has become almost familiar and socially accepted. It is justified by a reality where even the best initiatives are often abandoned midway, where the ordinary Albanian frequently fails to adapt even to the most basic urban norms.
Perhaps fatalism has also become an iron shield through which responsibility is delegated with the paradoxical phrase: “Let whatever happens, happen! We will all die in the end.”
Beyond everything else, our fatalism is not entirely baseless. Apart from the communist period and the monarchy — when some effort was made to establish authority and accountability — for the most part we learned how to outsmart systems rather than strengthen them. We became masters of nepotism, and both past and present systems transformed it into an art form. Meritocracy has become so rare that when it occasionally appears, it feels almost like a divine revelation.
The author of these lines recalls the moment when one of Albania’s greatest athletes of all time, Agim Fagu, was honored by former President Meta. During his speech, historian Pëllumb Xhufi, a close friend of Fagu, remarked: “There are certain people who honor the very recognition they receive,” referring to Fagu himself. Such moments are rare.
Meritocracy is dying under the weight of nepotism and favoritism, just as justice remains selective and cynical. The stockpile of 150,000 unresolved legal cases is the strongest argument of all. The tragic fate of many decent Albanians — often highly qualified professionals — pushes others to react simply with: “This country will never be fixed,” merely to protect themselves from another disappointment.
The current system often punishes those who are honest and correct. That is why Albanian society no longer demands accountability from officials (“it’s pointless anyway”); individuals resort to corruption or shortcuts (“everyone does it”); we distance ourselves from good examples — although sacred texts and world heritage are filled with stories of people who acted without seeking reward — and we no longer dedicate ourselves to the community.
Perhaps there remains a thread of hope, tied to the younger generation, which thanks to freedom of movement and the examples offered by the internet, is beginning to understand that this inherited fatalism of grandparents, parents, brothers, and sisters must be avoided — even mocked. After all, systems are not created by gods; they are the product of all of us.
The idealists of the early twentieth century understood this well, though they failed to change the essence of things. Meanwhile, Father Anton Harapi, a subtle observer of Albanian society, wrote in his time:
“The leaders of peoples have made one great mistake: they have forgotten that man as man, and people as people, can no more live without goodness and justice than they can live without air and food. They deceive themselves believing that the problems of human life can be solved merely through formulas, without true spiritual values. They show their ignorance if they forget that evil cannot be cured with evil, and that war itself has no cure for war.”
(Hylli i Dritës, XX, 1936)
And yet, there remains the possibility for the healing of hope — because, in the end, what else do we truly have left?
“We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.”
Goethe’s words feel almost like a justification for the Albanian condition, because hope is divine, and it comes to peoples in moments such as this one through which twenty-first-century Albania now passes — filled with dilemmas, stigmas, and desires.
The hope of Albanians, wounded by centuries, may still heal within this very social air. (Homo Albanicus)