Edi Rama is full of EU; don't buy it

Alfred Lela

If the Jews defied fate for centuries to gather their scattered tribe and become a nation in the land of their ancestors, where God had initially placed them, Edi Rama, who calls himself the 'Moses' (Ismail) of the Albanians, has an opposite plan. I cannot say whether it comes from diabolical or ingenuousness, or from the fact that he, as a human and political nature, sees success, not the process carried out correctly and that ends successfully, as the leading aim.

Edi Rama's speech in front of the Socialist Party's parliamentary candidates is alarming in what he holds as a program. Explanation below:

In 90 percent of the speech, the Prime Minister revolves around the idea of ​​membership in the European Union. In all his speeches, for more than a month, he keeps the discourse within this narrative framework (this process in public communication is called framing). The main topic is Europe and membership in the EU, and from it the entire text and subtext flow. How Rama has reached this conclusion, through surveys that it is said he frequently subscribes, that his advisors have told him so - or on his intuition, is unknown.

It is worth saying that Rama's pro- or pan-European narrative is not worrisome. Not at all. The EU is the natural path of this nation, as long as European values ​​and dreams have a place and preserve this aspiration for common improvement.

The methodology, that is, the way Rama sees EU membership and the process leading up to it, but also after arrival, is worrying, to say the least.

First, he sees the EU and Albania in it in mercantilist terms. He says in one part of his speech: in 10 years we have received 1 billion euros from the EU; when we join we will receive 1 billion per year! When the Prime Minister makes a financial calculation of membership in the club, there is nothing wrong in principle. That he does this like Sudja, a name that he often uses as a mockery of his opponent, i.e. as 'put in so much and I get so much more', makes him a usurer of dreams, a Ponzi of geopolitics, the-go-between who sells trust (when it is known that such people do not trade in trust).

It is not so much Rama as the accountant of the acquis communautaire that is disturbing, but the fact that his administration, with European money, has behaved exactly like the usurers of Sude with the percentages taken out the first time: squandering them, as everyone does when the easy money replaces the sweat. Rama himself puts the head of an example in the vice of bad memory. Says the 'accountant of Europe': from the funds of Agriculture we have received 300 million these 10 years. When we join the EU we will receive 300 million per year. He avoids a bitter fact that makes his government look bad. IPARD funds, the EU's arm for Agriculture, have been extorted by Rama's officials, and for this, the EU has opened an investigation and frozen the funds!

The question that arises from these two episodes is: Is Rama the one who should be trusted with EU funds?! Without forgetting the most important one, will the EU bring Albania into the club with Rama as Prime Minister when it knows that he is wasting the funds?!

The next question would be: What happened to these 1.3 billion euros?! Where did they go?

Rama could be forgiven for the money and the accounts with it, but the model he has for a 'European' Albania is cruel. In parts of the speech, the Prime Minister returns to the idea of ​​membership in Europe, equating it with a 'passport', with which no one stops an Albanian at the borders, with which he jumps from Albania to Sweden as if going from Shkodra to Korce; with which young people go and return, come and go, etc., etc.

To return to the Jewish fable, Edi Rama is trying, not to gather Albanians in the land of their nation, but to 'give a passport' to the Albanian tribe to move, to leave, and to come. So, not to establish foundations, but to move, uprooted in the direction of everywhere. The ambulatory people of Rama may be free, but they are not European. The Europeans do not emigrate: they have their safe homes, from whose windows they see the world where the Albanian, the Serbian, the Moldovan, the Syrian, the Afghan, and others, do not threaten their way of life, freedom, or civilization.

Albania, therefore, does not become European by joining the EU, but by becoming sovereign with its capacities for state-building, a stable economy, the rule of law, order, and security. Edi Rama does not talk about these, because he has nothing to say. He hides both the truth and the intention with high figures. So when, finally, as the people say,  Edi Rama returns as a political Sude 25 years after the anthropological Sude, which drew Albanians, as the siren did with the sailors of Ulysses, into the islands of chaos.

Edi Rama has this paradigm for Albanians: let this breed of restless go; with cheap tourists and workers from the Philippines and Bangladesh, with Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan enclaves, I will build an Albania that the world likes and I control it.

There is no Europe beneath Edi Rama's goals and narrative for Albania. Instead, there is a grotesque Zululand, with high towers downtown and 'strategic investors' on the Riviera. On the outskirts of Tirana and the country, there are ghettos with seasonal workers/immigrants from Europe and periodic vote sellers to the government.