By Ergys Mërtiri
Ermal Hasimi’s candidacy for the Municipality of Tirana gives value and meaning to this race which, otherwise, would have been a tragicomedy for the opposition.
Ermali gives us a reason to vote in a situation where we otherwise wouldn’t know who to vote for. Now it remains only for the opposition — if it still has two grams of dignity and moral sense left — to support him. In the catastrophic condition it’s in, there’s no room to play hard to get.
Berisha’s acceptance to support independent candidates first and foremost shows what we’ve been saying and repeating for years: the opposition’s need to reform itself and produce a new face.
With this move, Berisha showed that he knows perfectly well what kind of figures can win. He knows very well that with the tired faces who filled his closed MP lists just a few months ago, power is out of reach.
He knows perfectly well that to win, a new face must be produced — with new people, entirely different from the profile of the ridiculous, arrogant, and hysterical flatterers who fill his entourage in Parliament. Berisha showed with this that he knows, but he doesn’t want to.
And now, as he risks ending up with a result far more disastrous than that of May 11th, he is forced to do something — anything — to manage, even slightly, the bitter reality.
Secondly, there comes a moment when the theater — long turned into a farce, where the disheveled one spits fire while swearing he’s destroying Rama, making him tremble in fear of a “revolution” — is suddenly confronted with a harsh and merciless reality: that he himself is afraid to enter elections, unable even to find a decent candidate.
Now Berisha pretends that all this is done for the sake of opposition unity — precisely with those whom, just months ago, he accused of being Rama’s servants. The same people he backstabbed with an electoral code made in cooperation with Rama himself, handing him about ten free mandates.
Reality is becoming, and will continue to become, ever clearer. It’s the same reality I pointed out four years ago when I said that Berisha’s takeover of the Democratic Party would completely defactorize it as an opposition — shrinking it into a powerless minority, reduced to a garrison of militants waging an imaginary war against the entire world.