Renewal or just patching up?

By ARTUR AJAZI

No, this is not the Democratic Party leader’s invention. The “renewal of the DP” is the most meaningless invention in the reality the party is facing today. If you tell Albanians — and even more so, Democrats — that “we are renewing ourselves,” you naturally also have to tell them how this process will be made possible.

I remember the same names and the same faces in the DP from 25 years ago. I remember everyone Berisha kept in office from 2005, 2009, 2013 until today. He has held 114 National Council meetings, hundreds of rallies and protests, ousted Lulzim Basha by force, declared that “only I can lead the opposition to power,” lost some 14 elections, expelled more than 900 names from the party — from founding members to former branch chairmen — and filled the empty seats with sycophants and bootlickers.

Berisha claims that with the “Renewal” initiative, Democrats should understand “the removal of the stubborn, the critics and the rebels, and their replacement with apathetic, mediocre names and people.” The Doctor’s process, however, remains a “patching up” in one, two or several senses: patching up the void created by the departures; patching up that comes from the eternal reconfirmation of Sali Berisha as chairman, along with his inner circle; or patching up the “cracks” caused by the departure of the “bashists” at the hands of the Doctor’s loyalists.

So this “Renewal” process has embarrassed even Muli, Belinda and the branch chairmen themselves, who when asked say: “We have no idea what’s happening in the party, we just follow the Doctor’s orders.” So this is supposed to be the “Renewal”? What exactly is the Doctor renewing, what is changing in the DP, who has come from the youth, from the intellectual elite, how many new memberships have there been, how many concrete allies do you have in case of an electoral campaign for early elections — are you convinced that against Edi Rama and the socialist majority you can win the elections?

There are many question marks that make it impossible to believe in the “Renewal process,” which I would have sincerely believed if Berisha had withdrawn and made way for the young. But knowing that this has not happened for 36 years in that party, I cannot believe in the “Renewal” today.

This process is simply “patching up” — just a few “sleeves” that Berisha is attaching to his janissaries, those he uses in Parliament and in Tirana’s squares. So find another name, Doctor, at least quickly, before the elections — because the defeat of 2027 (let alone that of 2030) will deeply disappoint the Democrats still left in that chieftain-party.