By Ben Andoni
The lack of change in our country is no longer tied only to the rotation of central power. Just as it is not only about the Socialists winning everywhere—but about the absence of change, which no longer appears even on the horizon. Public sadness now is deep because nothing can be changed. Neither from top to bottom, nor the other way around.
The public cannot influence the Opposition, and no matter how hard it tries, the response it receives is cynicism and mockery, as if you are siding with Rama’s boundless power. Nor can people influence the Socialist majority—to make them a bit more socially conscious and empathetic toward citizens, especially families in need, or oil workers, miners, and everywhere farmers who have carried this country on their backs for decades across our history. Instead, you are drowned in empty rhetoric and endless subordinate clauses.
People, therefore, are sad because in Albania, change is impossible—at least until now. Elections have turned into a monotonous ritual, where Socialists openly flaunt cynical results that are predicted with precision (!); the opposition withdraws and does what it knows best—avoidance; crime has sunk its teeth everywhere; SPAK, from where politicians walk out laughing and drag their trials endlessly; and prices that never stop rising…
People are sad because they no longer know whom to turn to. Questions hang in the air.
Why is there no meritocracy? Why, in places where work is needed, can professionals not be found? Why must businesses follow the state’s logic on wages, when the country’s primary duty should be reducing informality?
How do the skyscrapers sprout?
Why is the Artificial Lake of Tirana—and nature everywhere—bitten away day after day under all sorts of justifications? How can those who hold construction permits feel no pain for nature, and those with the authority to grant them not think about the Albanians of the future?
Why is the frightening traffic not fixed?
Why do Albanians scream and make such excessive, abnormal noise?
Why, and why?!
This is why Albanians today feel worn down—because of the vast disappointment that democracy, though dressed more beautifully than the harsh tunic of the merciless Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is often heartless in the way those in power look down on citizens. This is what people remember today after the partial elections, while the Socialists openly challenge a nonexistent opposition. The few voices that try to rise are immediately pushed down.
Theoretically, we know that “changing established policies in a democracy is difficult due to a combination of institutional, political, and social factors that generate stability and require broad consensus for significant change.”
But John Adams, one of America’s founding fathers, foresaw it correctly for his own country nearly two centuries ago:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
It seems that we are not the ones killing it. Democracy is killing itself… in Albania.