The Protest Has the Face of Tomorrow’s Albania

In Albania, governance moves from one scandal to the next at such speed that the new scandal no longer manages to shock; it simply takes the old one’s place. The latest case touches one of the state’s most sensitive institutions. The director of SHISH, Vlora Hyseni, has been suspended from duty and a “house arrest” measure has been imposed on her. She is being investigated for “supporting the perpetrator of a crime” and “disclosing secret acts or data,” in proceedings linked to the AKSHI file. These are allegations under investigation and not a guilty verdict, but the political weight of the event is not diminished by this fact. The head of the secret service of a NATO country is under investigation over suspicions that touch the state secret itself.

In many Western democracies, this alone would be enough for a political crisis. In Albania, not even this is enough. As always, the pears and plums are eaten behind the king’s back. Resignation has disappeared from the political vocabulary and responsibility has been transferred entirely to SPAK. The government does not give account; it waits for the prosecution. The minister does not leave; he waits for the court. The prime minister does not take responsibility for the people he has chosen; he waits for the final verdict. With this logic, politics no longer bears political responsibility. It waits for it to become criminal. And when it becomes criminal, responsibility is personal.

That is why one scandal follows another without producing a government crisis. The public is shocked on Monday, gets another scandal on Wednesday and on Friday barely remembers the first one’s name. This has become a way of governing. Not because the scandals are small — they are very big — they have become so many that they have crossed into the level of the unbelievable.

In this climate, the protest that has been held every evening in Tirana for months has taken on another significance. On September 23 it entered its 116th day. Citizens and activists take part in it, while among the calls repeated for weeks is a sentence that leaves little room for misunderstanding: “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail.”

That is precisely its strength.

For the first time in a long while, anger against the government is not forced to pass through the DP headquarters. A citizen can be against Rama without becoming a Berishist. He can demand the departure of this government without demanding the return of the old government. He can reject today’s corruption without automatically registering in the political nostalgia of yesterday.

This makes the protest much stronger and much more dangerous for power than a party rally.

Rama knows how to fight Berisha. He has done it for years. He knows his vocabulary, his people, his history and the fear that his name continues to produce in part of the electorate. Facing Berisha, Rama always has a reserve argument: if you don’t want me, here’s who comes.

With a protest without Berisha, this argument is lost.

Berisha has his own problem with such a protest. It takes place against Rama, but also against him. Indeed, the protesters publicly demand his arrest too. Yet, on September 23 Berisha called on the structures, members and supporters of the DP to join the civic protest, calling support for it a “major duty” of the party. Total hypocrisy of the thief who wants to steal even the protest.

Here the political interests of Rama and Berisha begin to meet, without the need for any agreement between the two men. It suits Rama for the protest to take Berisha’s face, because that way he can turn the conflict back into the formula he knows best: Rama against Berisha. It suits Berisha for the protest against Rama to be seen as part of the opposition action he leads. One wins the old opponent; the other wins a protest he did not start himself and cannot make himself.

In the relationship between Rama and Berisha, the protest and Albania lose.

The moment a civic protest is identified with Berisha, part of Albania moves away from it. Not because it is satisfied with Rama, but because it does not accept that Rama’s departure comes with Berisha’s return. Precisely this mechanism has kept Albanian politics closed for years in the same narrow corridor: when you get angry with one, they show you the other.

Today’s protest is trying to get out of this corridor. In its banners and calls appear demands that go beyond replacing one name with another: limiting mandates, changing electoral rules, accountability for corruption and the end of political bargaining. On the 116th day, protesters held banners with messages for open lists, “clean hands” and the end of deals over the vote.

This protest does not resemble the usual opposition protests. It is not simply demanding a change of driver while the car continues on the same road. It was born from distrust of the way the entire political system works, and this distrust includes both the government and the traditional opposition.

The SHISH case only makes this more visible. When suspicions of ties to crime and the leaking of secrets reach the very top of the intelligence service, the problem is not a wrong minister, a corrupt director or a suspicious tender. It takes on the dimension of a system that continuously produces the same result and then waits for SPAK to clean up after it.

Under such conditions, the protest is today the most visible hope for breaking this circle for those citizens who reject both the continuation of Rama’s government and the return to Berisha. Not because the square automatically has the solutions, but because it is the only place where the old political equation is being openly challenged.

Here lies the real battle for the face of the protest. If it becomes “Berisha’s protest,” Rama regains the opponent he wants and Berisha wins the movement he did not create. Albania returns once more to the two names that have held the political debate hostage for decades.

But today the protest does not have that face. In the square one hears “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail.” This is a political fact far more significant than any photograph of leaders on a podium.

Its challenge is not to allow its face to be changed.

Because the protest that makes sense beyond an ordinary rotation is not the protest with Edi Rama’s face, nor the one with Sali Berisha’s face.

It is the protest with the face of the Albania that has not yet come.

By Thoma Gëllçi