The Cellar

Armand Maho

When Arben Ahmetaj declared that Edi Rama was drinking €33,000 wine with Ergys Agasi in the “Garden of Eden” he has built inside the Prime Minister’s Office, I initially received it with a thread of disbelief.
Not because I believe in Rama, nor because I think he is troubled by social equality or by the poverty this country endures.

Simply because I thought Ahmetaj might have exaggerated the bill a little, or that Rama or Agasi were not at that aristocratic level of people capable of appreciating such a wine—one that in our country costs as much as a studio apartment on the outskirts of Tirana, for which an average person would need to work some 15 years to pay off.

But recent developments showed that Ahmetaj was right. For Rama and Agasi, such an amount amounted to just a few sips, taken while they discussed how to extort millions from the money of all of us.

The wine cellar in Agasi’s basement was the clearest proof of this, while the theft deliberately allowed by the police shows plainly that Rama has far less respect for the taxes he is entrusted to administer than for the bottles of wine stacked there.

Personally, I have never had any doubt that Rama and his circle are insatiable in their stealing. But this episode alone, in a society with integrity, would have been enough not to wait until Monday to rip these bandits out of their offices.

Meanwhile, as the National Bureau of Investigation searched in vain for the wine bottles and the server footage, Edi Rama had the audacity to appear in his weekly rambling to announce that he would not abandon Balluku—the owner of 300 apartments and a member of this thieving, anti-Albanian gang. Then, in that stale spectacle, he handed the floor to a young woman who tried to explain why she had decided not to leave the “paradise” served to us by the man sitting opposite her—a man whose very gray hairs are soaked in shame.

This country is finished. To rise again, it requires the total purging of every last thief and trafficker that has sprouted at our doorstep. That is why Edi Rama must be removed from that post as soon as possible; it would be an honor we would do to ourselves, and to future generations. In a country where bandits hold one another hostage, and the hostage-takers are the friends who drink thousands of euros’ worth of wine with the Prime Minister, nothing good can come of it.

Because in creating this predatory model, we are all at fault. Those who applaud his abuses, those who wait for others to fight the battle, but also the opponents, who should have been more dignified in their struggle—through actions, not words.

Today, in the year 2025, we no longer have a government.

We are a robbed people, acting as spectators while Rama tries to denigrate the few prosecutors and judges with civic conscience who are punishing his thieves. In fact, it should be the opposite. Today, this caste of thieves—who flex their muscles with the mandate of Zegjine of Roskovec, Mila of Suel, or Taulant of the “Toyota Yaris”—should not be allowed anywhere near Parliament.

Rama should have been chased into the ravines of Surrel, and their image should be drawn into a tableau of shame, to show children what they must never become. That is the duty of a people. But we continue to behave as if nothing has happened, our minds fixed on the government’s revelry, while still failing to see the corpse lying at our doorstep.

That is why Rama drinks €33,000 wine with pensioners’ money, and why Belinda grazes freely on the properties of Albanians. Meanwhile, society is absorbed in its existential dilemma: “Whom shall we choose?”—just like back when the dictator died.