Albania, like a political metaphor of the former Soviet republics
By HENRI ȉLI
Edi Rama is master-minding a political action of radical features, signifying that we will now be introduced to another profile of the Opposition Leader, that of a radical. Every leader has the opportunity to apply each profile: of a radical or a moderate, the secret being that it must be in conformity with the circumstances. However, it appears that apart from Rama’s need to place the Socialist Party on the rails of radicalism to stifle and make life even more difficult for alternative thinking within the party, the conditions are not there for the radicalism of Albanian society. On the contrary, a process of normalization has gained strong inertia in this country, in conditions when we are moving towards European integration, and when, overall, our region is calming down and becoming more integration friendly. Rama works hard to convince the Socialist Party and Albanian society that the last elections were unacceptable, and that, “vote theft can no longer be tolerated,” and all this creates the opportunity for Rama to remain at the head of the SP, because according to him he did not lose in free and fair elections. In Albania, elections are a process involving at least fifty thousand voters and there is no need for a speech, even if it is Edi Rama delivering it, to convince Albanian society that “the elections were manipulated and the opposition was denied victory.” Neither are five or seven political analysts sufficient to convince the Albanians that these elections were free and fair and acceptable, if the perception of the public itself does not lean in that direction anyway. Without the slightest complex and with full conviction, today it could be said that these elections were free and fair, in terms of Majority-Opposition parity, or more accurately parity between the DP and SP, full parity, equal financial conditions, equal conditions concerning access to the media, bipartisan DP-SP electoral procedures, from the vote on the Electoral Code and up to the 7-0 vote of the Electoral College on the final results. There are victims in these elections, but they are the smaller parties, with the SMI at the head, however their co-aggressor is 50 per cent Edi Rama and 50 per cent Sali Berisha. This is why, all that is needed for the next elections is a little correction and fine tuning here and there-both in the electoral code and up to the optical vote count. Edi Rama, in compliance with all of this, hopes to build in Albania, the political metaphor of the former Soviet republics, something he mentioned several times in his speech at the Extraordinary Congress of the SP, convened a week ago. The parallelism drawn between Albania and these countries is not valid because Albania is a country fully under Western and not Russian influence, a country in the process of European integration. The efforts to draw parallelisms between Berisha and Georgia’s Shervanaze, or between Berisha and the Ukraine’s Leonid Kuzman are way out of line, because the Shervanaze-s and the Kuzman-s of Albania were toppled by the DP and Berisha in the elections of 1992. There are partial parallelisms between Berisha and leaders of the East European countries, but they have nothing in common with parallels that may be drawn with the former Soviet republics.
Together with the non-recognition of the legitimacy of the elections, together with a return to the model of radical opposition, and together with the metaphor of the Soviet republics, efforts to promote Gramoz Ruci as the socialists’ most honoured figure for 2009, as Rama very obviously did in his speech, the official line of the congress fell to a position of autism-in other words he was talking to himself and not to the Albanian society. With an open conflict in the party where Rama has lost the support of several leading figures, instead of seeking broader consensus with society, Rama, in fact is narrowing the base of consensus and support for himself in the party, where up until yesterday he was incontestable, but from 29 June onwards he is politically suspect. And this is only the beginning.
