By Ben Andoni
Has anything truly changed after the tragic death of the two children in Durrës? Listen to the terrifying roar of engines and the reckless honking of cars through our cities, to the accidents and traffic violators, and you will have your answer.
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 others. Has the cult surrounding Mr. Rama weakened, along with public concern over the chaos consuming so many aspects of life in the country? The answer is found in our daily reality and in the disorder that Albanians routinely encounter. Is Kosovo changing with the political rapprochement between Vjosa Osmani, the former president, and the Democratic League of Kosovo? One would expect more from a president with an excellent legal background, who decreed numerous documents later returned in large numbers by Kosovo’s Constitutional Court, proving she had often acted more as a notary of Mr. Kurti’s government — the very same man she now attacks with a fully sharpened political vocabulary.
So what should Albanians in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and beyond truly believe in regarding their respective states? Why does the state increasingly appear unequal before its own citizens? Why did Kosovo’s transitional Prime Minister Kurti appear so composed beside Mickoski? Why is the Democratic Party incapable of holding normal internal elections, attacking instead anyone who dares suggest they are acting wrongly? Why is wealth not distributed according to a more inclusive logic in Kosovo and Albania — states governed by Albanians themselves? There are no answers.
One indicator that illustrates this reality is what is happening in Albania regarding the distribution of bank deposits. Around 7% of the population — approximately 12,000 individuals — own more than 93% of the total assets held in deposits. This reveals a profound divide between a small minority accumulating capital and the rest of society surviving on what remains. Wealth taxes and other corrective mechanisms have failed to reduce inequality effectively, allowing capital to grow much faster than wages. Add to this labor-market inequality: a vast disparity in income where only a small minority work in high-productivity sectors, while more than one-fifth of the population at the bottom of the pyramid manages to secure merely around 7.5% of national income. And when one adds the reality of asset ownership, the polarization becomes even more tangible.
Meanwhile, it is also a fact that Albania, aided by favorable European historical circumstances, is advancing steadily toward integration. Yet when one listens to the discourse of the leading politicians of both camps — especially Rama and Berisha — it becomes deeply unsettling. Politics is attempting to eclipse everything through its endless protagonism.
“The whole world was horrified! ‘Negotiations were blocked,’ ‘negotiations were blocked,’ ‘Germany came out,’ ‘Germany went back in.’ How do you explain this? First, we explain it by speaking with you, and then you speaking with everyone else. People have this issue at the center of their attention because they want us to accomplish what they gave us all that support for. To make the European Union passport a reality for every Albanian. And for this to happen, we need strength,” Prime Minister Rama declared some time ago.
There is no need here to mention the mountain of insults thrown at him by the opposition leader and the entire debate surrounding integration.
This entire technical road toward integration faces a major internal challenge — the “healing” of hope. Our deepest wound, the one to which we continually surrender. If we imagine society as a pyramid, then if we believe in nothing positive, how can we transform ourselves, our society, and the very system we have built?
The greatest barrier is fatalism, which follows the Albanian individual everywhere. Reality feeds it constantly: weak public services, mass emigration, uncontrolled prices, the unfair advantage enjoyed by certain businesses that begin from modest positions and suddenly rise to the top, and the diminishing weight of the ordinary citizen. For anthropologists, Albanian fatalism — expressed continuously throughout the century-long existence of the Albanian state — is almost a recognized and accepted condition. It is justified by a reality where even the best initiatives often remain unfinished, where a considerable part of ordinary Albanians fail to adapt even to the most basic urban rules. Perhaps fatalism has become an iron shield, a way to escape responsibility through the paradoxical phrase: “Whatever happens, happens. In the end, we all die.”
Beyond everything else, our fatalism does not seem entirely baseless. Except perhaps during communism and the monarchy, when authority and accountability were at least partially considered, for most of our history we have sought ways to outsmart the ruling system. We have become masters at creating nepotism, and both past and present systems have elevated it into an art form. Meritocracy is 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. In his speech, historian Pëllumb Xhufi — a friend of Fagu — remarked: “There are certain people who honor the very award 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 backlog of 150,000 court cases is perhaps the strongest argument of all.
The tragic fate of many good Albanians — often professionals — leads others to react simply by saying: “This country will never improve,” merely to spare themselves the next disappointment. The current system frequently punishes those who are correct and principled. That is why Albanian society no longer demands accountability from officials (“there’s no point anyway”); individuals corrupt or seek shortcuts (“everyone does it”); we distance ourselves from good examples (though sacred books and world heritage are filled with stories of people who sought no reward); and we no longer dedicate ourselves to the community.
And yet perhaps there remains a thread of hope. It may lie in the younger generation, which, thanks to freedom of movement and the examples offered by the internet, is beginning to understand that it must reject and even ridicule the fatalism inherited from grandparents, parents, older brothers and sisters. After all, systems are not created by gods; they are produced by all of us together.
The idealists of the early twentieth century understood this well, though they could not change the essence of things. Father Anton Harapi, a remarkably perceptive observer, wrote in his time:
“The leaders of peoples have made one great mistake: they have forgotten that man as man, and a people as a people, can no more live without goodness and justice than without air and food. They deceive themselves by believing that the problems of human life can be solved merely through formulas devoid of genuine spiritual values. They reveal their ignorance when they forget that evil cannot be cured only with evil and that war itself has no cure for war.”
(Hylli i Dritës, XX, 1936)
And nevertheless, there is still a 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 itself, because hope is something divine, and it comes to nations precisely in moments like this — moments through which twenty-first century Albania now passes, burdened with dilemmas, stigmas, and desires. The hope of Albanians, wounded by centuries, may yet heal within this very social air.
(Homo Albanicus)