The Tirana race is a duel not a skirmish

Alfred Lela

The race for Tirana’s municipality is not, in fact, about governing the city, nor is it a competition to demonstrate who has the better alternative in this branch of local power, the largest in the country.

It is a race to dismantle Edi Rama, as it is a challenge directed against him, against his overreach of power, his autocratic dictatorship, and his insatiable lust as a political creature to control every corner of authority in the country.

Whoever sees this as a race about street cleaning, traffic, café chairs on sidewalks, or five other trivialities, does nothing but allow Edi Rama to extend both his grip and his philosophy further over the capital and Albania.

It is, therefore, a battle of political and urban philosophy: of polity more than policy, of political design more than urban design.

Having said this, without wishing to offend anyone, it is not a battle about any of the names put forward so far.

Because all the candidates who have expressed their desire, their self-sacrifice, or even those who have withdrawn, would not in reality be facing Ogerta Manastirliu, but Edi Rama himself.

In this sense, the Democratic Party needs to return to where it once was. In 2003, when—against Rama himself—it nominated Spartak Ngjela, then one of Berisha’s associates but not a “loyalist,” and one of the eloquent voices of the opposition. Not necessarily Ngjela himself, of course, but someone with a similar public profile—one who fights Rama through Rama, from the recesses of his consciousness and subconscious, of his past and his present.

That profile, better than anyone else, is fulfilled by Fatos Lubonja.

Lubonja, of course, is more than that. In the “Flattened Society” that Edi Rama has fought so hard to construct in Albania, Lubonja is one of the very few remaining reliefs.

He carries in his life curriculum prison, resistance, and survival against dictatorship. He fought Berisha and the right in 1997, and he has spent nearly two decades battling the authoritarian archetype of Edi Rama, once his friend.

In this sense, he is a candidate of transversal resistance and of the horizontal city. And the Democratic Party, if it wishes to be honest with itself, has no comparable figure in its ranks.

Lubonja’s candidacy is not a confrontation with Manastirliu; it is the counter-candidacy to Rama. Lubonja can defeat Rama because he can show the public—through the depth and authenticity of the contrast—who Edi Rama really is.

Others would be swallowed by the vacuum of baseness created by Rama himself and his propaganda machine: “We are not the best, but there are no better than us,” or “We are all the same, but at least I am entertaining.”

With Lubonja, the Democratic Party steps outside its own ranks but enters the city. I am fully aware of the hundreds of pursed lips of dissatisfied Democrats, but the political context is such that the paradigm cannot be anything other than this: if the DP cannot win, the second-best outcome is that someone defeats Edi Rama.

As for public communication, which is also the concern of the undersigned, Lubonja does not need packaging, branding, or coaching. He is a trusted public voice, one that resonates with the left, with the gray zone, and with Democrats—with whom, for more than a decade, he has shared the anti-Rama battle.

Given the fatal brevity of time for this confrontation, this point is of immense value.

Lubonja is the right candidate, especially since the state of the government and the Socialist Party in Tirana—after Veliaj’s imprisonment, after the “5D” scandal, after the incinerator affairs—is exactly what he has been describing for years. His old theory of “two gangs,” meaning the two big parties, has collapsed, because now there is only one gang. As a citizen and as an intellectual, it is both his duty and his honor to stand against the Uni-Gang in power.

Even if he does not win the municipality, the contrast he would create would provide the most accurate portrait of Edi Rama, and a telegram announcing the end of his rule.

What is needed, then, is not an “Ogert” or an “Ogerta” to face Rama’s Ogerta—but an anti-Rama: someone who makes the duel appear equal, and winnable.

The opposition, in Tirana, needs a duel—not a group skirmish.