Erion Veliaj has again opposed delegating control of Tirana City Hall to Arbër Hajdari. From pretrial detention in Fier, the mayor published the responses he says he gave to Justice Minister Toni Gogu, while also addressing a message to Prime Minister Edi Rama.
Veliaj says he handed over control of City Hall to someone else once before, for 18 months, and will not do so again. He underscored his position with the English saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”: if someone deceives you once, the shame is theirs; if it happens a second time, the shame is yours.
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“I will not delegate BT,” he says. According to Veliaj, his mandate rests on the GJK and the 160,000 votes of citizens and left-wing voters, not on a decision by the prime minister.
Speaking about the period when he did not exercise his powers himself, Veliaj claims City Hall built no schools, planted no trees, launched no new investments, made no important decisions and issued no loans. He also says Qatar was lost for the New Boulevard and the EIB for the Lana.
By contrast, he says, after he regained his powers, six schools were unblocked in September and 1,500 soft loans for citizens were unblocked within a few weeks. Veliaj says he does not attribute this change to being more capable, but to the responsibility that comes with being elected.
The mayor also criticizes Rama, saying the prime minister had promised to deal personally with Tirana’s problems, while the situation, according to Veliaj, worsened.
His criticism extends to the government. Veliaj claims none of the current ministers has spent even a day in opposition and, for that reason, they do not know the history of the socialists’ political struggles. He recalls that he himself was present on January 21, during the hunger strike and on “January 28,” which he says the prime minister knows about, as well as in the summer of 2011, when, according to him, everyone left R alone.
Veliaj asks where today’s ministers were at those moments. He says their lack of that memory makes it easy for them to deceive Rama and poison him with claims about “internal enemies”; he compares their behavior to the fools in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
