Written by: Ben Andoni
The Democratic Party, when it starts its long periods of vacation or pause, is asked for protests. But when the latter are realized, they criticize it again for its massiveness, idea and performance! The Socialist Party is more comfortable. There is no need to protest, everything is fine. The party itself has taken the form of a detachment, where if you raise your voice a little too much, you find yourself outside. Or it is better to be inside and turn into a cog, part of a mechanism that Charlie Chaplin immortalized in the factory scene in “Modern Times”.
The elliptical efforts of the former Foreign Minister, Spiropali, systematically and not with wooden language also proven by her predecessor Ditmir Bushati (both after dismissals) have shown not only the lack of spirit in our political modernity, but the current level of internal democracy of the Socialist Party. It is not appropriate to enter into an examination or confusion of the terms spirit and soul with a simple treatment. The Bible summarizes this for us in the unity of three categories: “And may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and your whole being: Spirit, soul and body. I pray that you may keep them unblemished until the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians: 5:23). Saint Paul refers to the three elements that make up the individual, where man remains a unity fused into a whole and not a whole that includes separate parts.
Our treatment is about phenomena in a secular world, where the spirit has been lost in everything and we are in constant search of widely accepted change. Gandhi, the peaceful warrior of the poor, demanded this of the being itself: “The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It must come from within.”
Today this is missing in every aspect of our lives. Even more so in politics, as it is impossible for the majority represented by the Socialist Party to raise and maintain a spirit of change. Contempt, greed, immense corruption, added to the fact that some of its individuals have lost touch with ordinary people, make the notion of empathy simply abstract. The latter has long since departed from the socialists if you are not in their shoes. The DP has it worse, because both spirit and soul cannot find themselves among them. The first, spirit, to give life to the effort to strengthen this opposition force and, second, the raising of the spirit that the DP must have for the future change. Therefore, their slogans are becoming ridiculous and a little stale. Among them: "The end of Rama in a matter of hours, days, weeks... 'The last kilometer' (!!)". This is what this formation suffers from, to which Albanians once gave the attributes of newness and change with all their heart, and this is seen with regret in their protests, where people avoid and continue their daily lives. The body of the DP is completely devoid of the spirit of change, while the spirit they want to give it from above is not enough for anything. It is amorphous, just like the stale rhetoric that people see, instead of communicating to them. This is the existential equation that their structures must answer and that has been waiting for years on the bedside tables of the empty DP offices.
There is, however, a consolation, and this is related to the political anthropology of the country. This lack is considered a long-standing disease of Albanians, what the people who created and cultivated the ideological current of neo-Albanianism, demonstrated to those few Albanians of the 30s who managed to read and understand. Among them, the unfortunate Vangjel Koça (he would end very badly in 1943 after sinking along with the ship that was escorting him to Italy) insisted that the soul of a nation is given only by the Elite of the Nation. He presented it in "Minerva" with an article that argues it with the case of a character of Anatole France, who expresses himself with the ideas of the writer: "An entire city, an entire nation, rests on a few people who think with greater power and more correctly... What is said about the GENIUS of the RACE reaches its consciousness only through a few small minorities. In every country, free spirits who can shake off popular prejudices and discover the hidden truth are rare...". And, again in his argument, Vangjel Koça, written in 1937, rightly added: A Nation can never consist only of material factors and physical elements, such as race, language, land, but also of spiritual factors, of psychic elements that dominate them and give the Nation an organic and harmonious whole... Simply, a unity of all things far from the terrible materialism that is suffocating today's Albanian.
If it were only the Albanian case, this would be sad for its integration path, but today, democracies in Eastern Europe are losing their “soul”, an element that is considered in articles as a democratic regression, a loss of trust in institutions (what respect can an Albanian have for his institutions that have caused thousands of deaths. We are talking about the courts and cadastres), and the historical legacy of authoritarianism. The motto “Let’s make Albania like Europe” has now become about who gains the most at the expense of the country or KÇK, as the prime minister himself expressed it, rightly stigmatizing a bunch of extortionists. Today’s elite is faced with voter apathy, modern autocracy and the compromise of the judiciary, naturally moving outside the principles of democracy.
Rama's immense power in Albanian life, like Orban's in Hungary until a few days ago, Vučić's in Serbia, added to that of the Kaczyński brothers in Poland, have not simply reshaped the political landscape, taking the monopoly of representing the "people", but confronting it with cynicism and de facto pluralism and weakening democratic checks and balances. They are the state itself. The Albanian Prime Minister even identifies the main motto of Albania's integration into the EU: "With Edin in Europe!" Historians and critics have ready the justification with the communist legacy of the region and the slow cultivation of democratic traditions, considering these as causal reasons. Except that the consequences are increasingly a citizen who does not believe in the state and institutions and cannot create a spirit and does not cultivate a spirit for change. Meanwhile, the accountability of the Albanian government is lacking, Berisha's opposition (he identifies with the DP) continues to be anemic, and collective engagement against propaganda and authoritarian control seems almost impossible. "We need to give a Spirit to the Albanian nation. This is Albania's biggest problem," Konica wrote hopefully immediately after independence was declared. This spirit, it seems, is still missing among us. Even after 114 years of statehood, we need spirit and soul, those that we are unable to protect. (Homo Albanicus)
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