TIRANA, Dec. 2 – The leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, Lulzim Basha, has been on a nationwide tour urging Albanians to join a large anti-government rally on Dec. 8 in Tirana.
Dec. 8 is a national holiday, Youth Day, set to commemorate student protests in 1990 that started the toppling of the then-communist regime in Albania, forcing it to accept political pluralism.
Basha accuses the government of Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama and his main coalition partner, Ilir Meta, the parliament speaker and head of the Socialist Movement for Integration, of taking the country backwards, increasing poverty and unemployment.
“In a week, Dec. 8, we shall join and rise to topple the tyranny of crime and corruption and take our fate in our hands and that of the trampled Albanians from the governing of this majority,” Basha told supporters at a meeting in Durres.
Using harsh rhetoric is typical in Albanian political speeches, and the Democrats have called for nonviolent resistance to the government’s bad governance.
Basha accuses Rama and some key ministers in his cabinet of corruption and mismanaging new reforms that have led to higher taxes. He is offering lower taxes under a proposed Democratic Party-led government.
He says that the country is in a chaotic economic situation due to bad governance.
Basha and the party he leads have suffered two back-to-back humiliating electoral defeats and are trying to change their fortunes as Albanians grow uneasy with the costs of the government’s reforms.
Political parties in Albania like to show their strength in large rallies, but in recent such attempts Albanians have shown they are increasingly growing jaded with politics and are abandoning such political shows.
