From speeches with tambourines to those with sunshine and a sieve: the trivialization of Edi Rama

Alfred Lela

Quite a few opponents mention Prime Minister Rama's formal education, the Department of Figurative Arts at the Higher Institute of Arts, cynically calling him a 'drawing teacher' because those who graduate there have this listed on their diploma.

This is also done for another reason: Rama, in his early days, was especially noted for his open public ridicule of the socialist realism movement, the National Liberation War, and the Labor Party. For a long time, he formulated himself as the antithesis of kitsch, both socialist and democratic, that is, after the fall of communism. As if to fulfill the popular expression "whatever you laugh at, you will wear," Edi Rama, in recent years, has become the king of kitsch himself.

From a hater of socialist realism, he has transformed into a user of 'comrades and friends, long lives the party,' 'you be you, we are gone,' etc. From a despiser of the People's Theatre, its actors, and Zhdanovism in art and culture, he has become a Zhdanovist and a developer of a double-edged political theatre, which he stages at every outing.

This was the case with the meeting with the 'socialist youth.'

When you saw the hall of the Concert Hall (former Congress Hall) full of young people, teenagers, and children at the beginning of 2025, filled with the desired enthusiasm and party pathos for those who,o at the time of the last Congress of the Labor Party, and the first of the Socialist Party, in 1991, were children or teenagers, and followed it even if only vaguely, they cannot help but compare and notice that the Socialist Party is far from being the progressive formation that Dritëro Agolli, Fatos Nano and several other progressive socialists of that time conceived, in the face of the scum that was the Labor Party.

Despite the brilliance of the stage, Rama's meeting with the youth in pathos and speeches resembled the initial congresses of the Labor Party more than a modern European socialist party. It can be said that Edi Rama, in the delirium of a one-man show, has transformed the largest party of the Albanian left into a sect where the most vain, the most shallow, and the most corrupt occupy the forefront of the country. The student from Devolli who spoke about the ruined education and the young people who want to leave was the exception that reinforces the rule. Let's face it: such awareness would put the Socialist Party in power for 12 years and would be an honor. But no, the 'rose petals of the SP' were scattered with the pollen of collective pathos, which sprouted in the Concert Hall, as if neither Ramiz Alia nor the five-year plans of chronic failures had ever left this country.

When you listened to Rama, you couldn't help but notice in his speech the notes of a Ramizian hypocritical humility and an Enverian arrogance, a combination of 'what the people say, the party does, and what the party says, the people do.'

The speech was full of inconsistencies, such as the bombastic boasting of technological achievements and the tenfold increase in income in this sector. However, Rama did not mention how it arrived, even if this figure is accurate. There is no IT industry in Albania, as the Prime Minister claims. Yes, there is a semi-legal call center industry, which generates millions of informal jobs; yes, there are illegal bitcoin factories, for some of which the partner of the Prime Minister's brother, Amant Josifi, is being prosecuted; yes, there is a technology center in Piramida, but more than the 'industry' generated by this start-up, the kiosks that Rama planted around it stand out. Thus, he debunked the myth of his political youth, the uprooting kiosks from Lana and Parku Rinia. Twenty years later, he replanted them in forms even stranger, even more blatant, and even more invasive than the mobile and temporary shacks that populated the first decade of transition.

As if he were not the prime minister of 'big things' but the drawing teacher who also knows about physical education, Rama boasted of the 'hundreds of gyms' that had opened in his time. "And from an era without any physical education classes - Suden had physical education teachers, and Rrapushi had physical education professors - today we have, not only physical education for everyone….". Note 'physical education for everyone,' a slogan that seems to have come down from the generations of Bregu's voluntary actions to plague his socialist realist speech.

The Prime Minister also brought up the Mountain Package, an open insult to the North of Albania. This province is behind in every other development path due to the lack of assistance from the Rama government and has only excelled thanks to private initiatives, guesthouses, agrotourism, and mountain tourism. Rama becomes ridiculous when he wants to shamelessly plant the parable of the Albanian, with a tower turned into a guesthouse, which makes so much money that he can support his family in Italy or Greece. By overturning the scheme of emigration and financial remittances that are changing direction, now going from Albania to the West, the Prime Minister, in his excitement, does not even stop to ask himself: why do so many Albanians leave if they can make money to send to relatives abroad?  

The Prime Minister hallucinates, especially when discussing education, as if he and the government had strong points. All international reports and studies classify Albanian education at the bottom of the table. As with Lazarat, which was closed to cannabisize Albania, the Crystal Showcase, their methodology, was transferred one by one to other higher education institutions in the country. The public university does not yet have a campus. Corruption, grade buying, manipulated elections, etc., are no longer news. Not even Rama's 'granddaughter,' who set the dome of the Ministry of Education in motion, batted an eyelash at a superstructure now concerned with party patronage and not national education.

Of course, Rama is a politician, and through his words, he has to cover more than he reveals. But, 12 years later, the tambourine of 2013, with which he used to beat the world, has become a sieve that neither covers the sun nor surprises anyone.

Twelve years of steering, pan, tambourine, and sieve have been enough for the 'world leader's' speeches to resemble Ramiz's when he knew that allowing the herds would not save the economy, and Enver's when he had lost it, but still kept Albania a 'granite rock on the shores of the Adriatic.'