By Alfred Lela
Today, at 6:00 p.m., the Democratic Party and its opposition allies gather, in what they have called a “march towards Tirana”, to react to the political, economic and social situation in the country. This time, there will be no speeches, calls, and even scenography, but this is not new.
The protest, intended as a march, aims to include everyone who disagrees with this government. So it is meant to be horizontal, not vertical; not with Berisha and other exponents of PD and the opposition who make calls or present the theses of the revolt, but with people who march alongside each other, regardless of whether they are left or right, nationalist or cosmopolitan, conservative or progressive.
Today’s protest of the opposition is therefore urbi et orbi, for the world and the city, addressed to everyone and no one in particular.
The idea here is that a bad government does not distinguish between itself and its opponents; a bad government, when it mismanages or corrupts public funds, affects not only the taxes of the democrats, but also of the socialists, not only destroys today’s finances, but interferes with the chances of the future.
This awareness should be what unites those who have been protesting against Edi Rama and Rilindah for years, with those who have a dissatisfaction, an anger torments them, a disagreement with the way things are going in Albania.
Any temptation to see the protest as a plight of the political opposition is the old attempt to build dividing blocks of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘left’ and ‘right’. In an Albania that works, everyone is ‘good’, the opposite, in an Albania that works only for a minority, everyone is ‘bad’. This is because, all together, they lose what is the essence of a democratic system: equal chances in the game, and only capacities make the difference. When this equation is undone, then we have the law which erases any excess of one over the other.
Albania today is clearly the excess of a small group over the majority. Nothing explains this more simply and clearly than Albania shrinking and the diaspora swelling. This exodic escape is not a psychedelic whim, it is not a migration for a ‘change of environment’; those who flee are not artists who move in search of inspiration, but Albanians who want to place themselves in front of equal opportunities and equality before the law.
The rejecters of today’s protest are therefore of two types. Those who are gone and have no way to be, and those who remain, who also have no way to come. This second group includes the captured army of the administration and their families who, willingly or unwillingly, form the army of patron Nazis, which today will be under full surveillance of the opposition march in Tirana.
Having said that, we should not hide behind our fingers: yes, there is a decline in protests and participation – for the reasons mentioned above – but the misunderstanding here is that of those who complain about the ‘powerlessness of the opposition’. Those who contributed to the shrink talk about it as someone else’s fault. The depth of the problem tightens society and speaks of its powerlessness to keep alive the mechanisms of disobedience, renewal, dissent, rotation, etc.
Those who fled protested on foot, some of those who remained were constantly on foot. Others are those who refuse to recognize the reasons of those who flee and those who stand.
These are the people who are sitting on their ass.