‘The Mountain Package’ as the final auction: a power left with no wealth to give away and no shield to protect itself

For more than a decade, the public debate on the longevity of Edi Rama’s power has remained stuck in superficial analyses that speak mostly of the magic of digital propaganda, of the iron control over the media, of the chronic weakness of the opposition or of a certain fatal apathy of Albanian society.

In truth, he has held power mainly through an iron pact built on two pillars: on one side, the uninterrupted distribution of public loot and, on the other, the guarantee of legal untouchability for the court.

But every predatory economy carries within itself a mechanical and unavoidable limit: the physical wealth to be alienated is not infinite, while the monopoly over hiding the truth cannot be kept forever.

A regime that lives by distributing Albania naturally enters agony when it runs out of Albania, and collapses when it can no longer guarantee the untouchability of its courtiers.

That is why the regime has turned to the last wealth it has left. After the cities were squeezed to asphyxiation with towers and the coast was carved into fiefdoms of oligarchic resorts, the turn has come for the forests, pastures, rivers and deep peaks.

The so-called Mountain Package represents no new vision of rural or economic development; it is the desperate call of a regime that has opened the last drawer of the national inventory to keep itself on its feet by buying the loyalty of its clients.

In each of its mandates, the socialist government has opened a new territorial and monetary frontier to be exploited, while the clientele demands more and more loot.

In the early years, it was budget money: massive road tenders, health concessions and public-private partnerships, like that of the incinerators. Public money poured directly from the poor budget toward shell companies, behind which the clients hid.

In parallel, the auctioning of underground wealth then began. Mining licenses, quarry permits, hydrocarbon concessions and the rights to exploit underground wealth became the next treasure for the clientele.

When the budget bag tightened and there was no mine left ungiven, the second phase began, that of the privatization and concreting of the main cities.

Tirana and the main urban centers turned into giant laundries for laundering suspicious money and into a reward construction site for clients. Towers sprouted over parks, over gardens and over historic heritage sites, turning them into concrete fields and bringing infrastructural asphyxiation.

The third phase was the landing on the sea. Through the strategic investments law and the disarmament of the protected areas law, the coastline from north to south was distributed by government decisions to a handful of people.

Civil and military ports were stripped of their commercial and strategic function to be turned into residential projects of yachts and private apartments. The coast filled with fences and exclusive beaches, leaving citizens without access to the beach where they had spent their whole lives.

And so the government arrived at the current phase, in the fourth mandate: the Mountain Package.

After tenders and PPP contracts were distributed, after cities were drowned in concrete and after every inch of sand along the Ionian and Adriatic was given away, the eyes of power turned to the heights.

Propaganda presents this initiative as a noble project for “mountain tourism development” and “revitalizing the village.” But in the regime’s political economy vision, this is nothing but the final landing of plunder on the remaining part of the territory.

The Mountain Package is the result of the exhaustion of other resources. When power has to give even the deep slope of the forest, the alpine pasture, the waterfalls and the steep peaks, this means the usual inventory of favors has run out.

It is the typical behavior of the bankrupt merchant who, after selling the luxury goods and the shop’s furnishings, starts tearing up the floorboards to make firewood.

The Mountain Package aims to remove environmental obstacles for construction in mountain areas, giving by concessions and special permits to the government’s clients those lands that nature and remoteness had spared until yesterday.

After the mountains there is nothing left to distribute. The mountains are the end of economic favors to preserve the clients’ loyalty.

But the regime’s crisis does not stem only from the exhaustion of public loot. The regime is also collapsing its second pillar, the monopoly over justice and the guarantee of immunity.

For years, power could control prosecutors, hide files, intimidate witnesses and close investigations through political control of justice.

But this protective dome has been cracked for good thanks to SPAK. This protective dome has been cracked also because evidence is no longer produced only in Albania. The decrypted communications of EncroChat and Sky ECC, international investigations and cooperation with Europol and Eurojust have taken a part of the files out of Tirana’s control.

Prime Minister Rama can appoint a minister, but he cannot unregister a conversation from European servers; he can control the parliamentary majority, but not Europol’s laboratories.

Investigations are no longer a matter of the will of a typical local Albanian prosecutor who can be blackmailed or lured with a post. When evidence is kept outside the country, the guarantee of immunity inside it also falls.

All those who yesterday built with dirty money, took predetermined tenders or exploited dark political connections, understand today that the government cannot protect them anymore. Consequently, fear replaces loyalty and suspicion replaces cooperation.

Historical experience with predatory regimes and deep clientelist systems shows this is a well-known scenario that has toppled seemingly unbreakable regimes. For this there is no need to look far — the neighbors suffice.

In North Macedonia, Nikola Gruevski believed the megalomania of concrete and the complete capture of institutions would guarantee him eternity, until wiretaps burned his political shield and left him abandoned by the very oligarchs he had fed.

Milo Gjukanović’s nearly three-decade system in Montenegro, after exhausting coastal concessions and public wealth for his clan, in the final desperation to find new inventory of control and plunder, dared to lay hands on church properties; a crossing of boundaries that ignited the irreversible popular revolt.

In parallel, the files of Western agencies and the decryption of communication codes definitively undid his monopoly over impunity.

Here the life cycle of this model finally closes. A power that kept itself on its feet by using the national territory as reward currency and control over justice as a shield, today finds itself with neither of these levers.

When the leader is left with no public wealth to entice and no legal shield to guarantee untouchability, the entire architecture of loyalty turns into panic.

This power’s game is ending and the only thing waiting on the table is the unpaid bill of this national ruin.