By Prof. Përparim Kabo
What was expected is now happening: the popular despair that has built up day after day and the patience that has finally run out. Dissatisfaction is now fueling nationwide protests throughout the homeland. Adventurous hedonism, the appalling plunder of national wealth by a handful of people close to and in power, the theft of public property and citizens’ private property, the lack of economic development, the destruction of the domestic production market, the depopulation of entire territories, the tricks involving strategic investors and the package of mountains, the fratricidal Law 7501, education and health care receiving miserable investment, and, on the other hand, the luxurious lives of government officials and their children create a searing contrast.
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It was believed, since 2016, when the anti-corruption package was approved, that the new bodies of the justice system would legally cleanse the political class, but this did not happen. The changes have been minimal and carried out against a suspicious backdrop of dark interests. The parliamentary majority, with arrogance and conceit, has turned the approval of legal changes into a procedural formality, while the opposition combines its open opposition with cooperation by some of its members with those in power for market interests.
Both sides have lost. Today’s state of mass dissatisfaction is one single 35-year-old story. There is no politician living a normal life; they are all very wealthy because of their businesses, not their salaries. They left the people with poverty, insecurity about their lives and fleeing for their lives.
The current government pretends to be buying modernity, but it has not guaranteed normality or the social guarantees of life. The territorial administrative reform is an expression of the concentration of power in a few hands; this situation, however, reflects a deep crisis in governance. The more power is concentrated in a few hands, the less delegated sovereignty the people have.
Power is not an administrative force, but the assumption of the role of public servant. The protest took on the proportions of a social hurricane when the students joined it. It will not stop because it expresses the highest ideal: love for the homeland, for a worthy Albania with citizens who are economically respected in their human dignity. What good are cranes and construction everywhere when young people could not afford to buy a home even if they lived two lifetimes?
Without secure employment, without a home, what solution remains? Leaving. But the students no longer want to leave; they want their homeland, which politics has turned into a marketplace and now wants to sell off. Blind retaliation, involving fires and breakage, was also added to the protest. It was carried out mainly by adolescents from broken families, who cannot raise their children properly, not because they do not want to, but because they cannot.
Yet they, too, are part of our society, and their misfortune is a responsibility shared by society as a whole. It is true that they have caused damage to urban facilities and private businesses, but the greatest damage is the motivation that drove them to commit these acts. They grew up without a childhood, without cinemas, puppet theaters, circuses, extracurricular clubs or holiday camps.
The democracy in power left them with only the freedom of the streets and its vices. The police have lost their composure; they are under pressure from orders and confrontations with offenders, but violence against a defenseless person does not make you a police officer who upholds public order.
Stop carrying out orders that lead you to uncontrolled actions. You are Albanians, you have families, and some of you are parents. Join the peaceful protesters, because escaping this system of thieves is also in the best interests of your children.
That member of parliament who is the first to leave Parliament by relinquishing his mandate will enter the history of change. It is time for a transitional government and for the rebuilding of a functioning democracy, with prosperity and dignified public services.
Albania, and its fate and course, does not belong to politicians but to Albanians.
