Artan Fuga’s analysis: Citizens realized the authorities had abandoned them. The people’s servants living in luxury! What is left but revolt?

By Artan Fuga

The collective conscience offended and outraged

I feel a sense of disgust and misery toward certain analysts, professors, or moralists who openly or indirectly, like hyenas or foxes, pretend not to understand and essentially formulate the idiotic question: How did they suddenly revolt like this, for heaven’s sake?

Because for decades they have kept their ears and eyes closed, though not their mouths, they think popular discontent did not exist, had not been growing, and had not become a scorching volcano. Now they pretend to find the causes, when in fact they themselves are the causes.

The consciousness of public opinion, especially outraged public opinion, is not formed in a second, nor without reason, nor stirred up and sustained by conspiratorial factors. It is created gradually until it takes shape as a shared public opinion.

Without claiming to be exhaustive, this discontent that today is pouring into the squares and streets of the capital, onto social networks, into homes and neighborhoods across the country, was created little by little and replaced the illusions and utopias that after the fall of the dictatorship Albania would now, immediately, automatically become like the whole of Europe!!!

1. Discontent came and grew stronger from social reality itself, which instead of confirming the propaganda, openly contradicted it. Demographic emptying, the ruin of education, the degradation of the country’s productive infrastructure, stagnation in European integration, manipulated elections, an aging political class that would not accept political rotation and the citizens’ will, the degradation of healthcare, unemployment — in short, everything bleak that the mass of citizens carries on its shoulders.

2. Emigration became a bridge linking the lived experience of the large masses of Albanians who live abroad, in European countries and beyond, with the people who live in Albania. Public opinion learned from this that life with dignity, civil liberties, the state as a servant of citizens, freedom of speech, and so on, in Europe are not what a backward political class offers us in Albania.

3. Social networks, so heavily anathematized by the propaganda of all regimes in Albania, pointed at by all sorts of ignorant scholastics, proved their power as the people’s media, as the people’s universal cafés, where they pour out their troubles. Popular discontent found in social networks the place where it solidified.

4. Albania’s degraded parliament nevertheless gave the opposition, in its fight for power, the opportunity to criticize the government and bring a good deal of corruption and everything anti-people into the open. This should not be denied to the opposition, even if all of this was a battle of words with no practical political role whatsoever. As I have said, for various reasons the opposition is currently not a political factor in parliament, but only a speaker. This rhetorical aspect nevertheless helped ignite popular discontent, while through its own political action it blocks it.

5. Through anti-constitutional codes and laws, the population has understood that the vote in Albania has no value. What the opposition regarded as vote-buying devalued it, but every purchase also has a seller, and the sale of the vote was in itself an act of popular revolt against the inflation of the vote, which even today is worth nothing. Meanwhile, the government controls the vote as much as it needs to, even choosing those opposition MPs it wants, through mechanisms that citizens know very well! When the political system resembles a closed system, then citizens’ energies will flow especially outside it, outside politics, into a revolt and popular discontent that in its anger and rage includes the entire political class of the country, and not only that.

6. It is known that the consciousness of discontent and revolt is fed among the masses especially by the scandals and sins and vices of the ruling classes. That is how it has been and that is how it continues to be. However faint and infrequent SPAK’s accusations may be, they showed that corruption was not an artifact of political rhetoric, but a tangible reality. Billions of lek stolen, looted, mismanaged. Let us not forget that the people see the luxurious life led by those who call themselves their servants. The servant has climbed onto the master’s neck and says to him: Come on, act like a horse! Neigh and clatter along!, while striking him in the sides with his heels! MPs’ salaries in the stratosphere, the public administration filled with friends, patronage operatives, and militants, some of them socio-political euphorics to the point of idiocy. The quarrels within the ruling political class, the mutual accusations between government and opposition, have often been about who was the bigger thief than the other, more incapable than the other, a greater looter of votes than the other, more violent toward squares and people than the other. This long story over two or three decades one day rooted in the people the idea that they are all the same, and it has naturally radicalized the revolt and dissatisfied public opinion!

The masses of citizens realized that they had been left abandoned; power had abandoned them, politics as such — which only spins and spins in parliament and in media studios at night — had abandoned them, and the civil servant had abandoned them.

1. Ah, the civil servant! Just listen to what citizens say, to the hundreds and thousands of cases they recount where in a state office you cannot get anything done without flattering the civil servant, without saying: oh how handsome you are and how beautiful you are, how clever you are, without promising that you will be grateful for the service being done for you, which you pay for with your taxes, and finally, finally, by putting into his or her hand the money that he or she asks for with their eyes, with their words, with their behavior.

2. Revolt and dissatisfied public opinion did not come because citizens read the theoretical treatises of Locke, Spinoza, or Rousseau, but because life taught them, because they feel abandoned in hospitals, in pharmacies, in land registry offices where property is taken according to the law made by the MP, the politician, who then tells others: Have I broken any law? What’s wrong with you, populists? A people stripped of every property, which accumulates in the hands of those appointed by political decisions or simply because they have the ability to be puppets to hide the real owner, hand back one by one to the politician or administrator the money they supposedly earn through tenders.

Hopeless, abandoned, abused, paid as if receiving alms, insulted in every office, left dressed in used clothes, offered medical drugs that are not infrequently useless, left out in rain and sun, watching the wealthy glow of those who tell them every day: We are your servants!, disappointed, when after 35 years the promises have been trampled underfoot, when natural resources are given away, sold, gifted for personal interests, when they are told: Stay there because you do not know, I know! — what else is left for civic conscience, for public opinion, other than to be dissatisfied, other than to revolt?