“Resign”: Rama Reminds Tabaku of the January 21 Massacre — “Today They Protest on the Same Boulevard Where People Were Killed”

The citizens’ protest brought another clash in Parliament between Prime Minister Edi Rama and DP MP Jorida Tabaku.

She asked Rama to listen to the protesters who, she said, have been demanding his resignation for 110 days.

The prime minister responded by recalling January 21, when four protesters were killed on the boulevard, and said that today citizens protest in the same place unharmed. Rama also mocked the opposition, calling it a “contagious disease of chronic losing.”

“When you have protesters at your door for 110 days and you say ‘they are driving us out’… Try it once, go out there, because yours have tried and they were dragged away. Secondly, instead of listening to them and taking as an alarm bell what the people out there are demanding, you behave again with the same arrogance that brought those people out into the square. Today there is a call from the citizens and the call is: ‘Rama, resign!’ Listen to it, since you listen to the crowd, and implement their demands,” Tabaku said.

Rama replied in rebuttal:

“Ms. Tabaku, you were not here when I made the rebuttal to all your repetitions, with a trembling body, about ‘100 days of protest, 100 days of protest,’ and I want to repeat it to your face like this. When citizens protest under the government’s window, it is called democracy, and when they do it without getting a thorn in their foot, it is called pride. Even more so when they do it on the very boulevard where people were killed and wounded. But when the protesting citizens tell the opposition and you personally to ‘go away,’ then it is a contagious disease that that protest does not want. And they are not to blame, because you are a contagious disease of chronic losing. Whoever gets close to you loses, loses, loses.”