Rama is losing those who protected him from the opposition

Alfred Lela

By using tear gas—reportedly expired- Rama may have managed to clear opposition protesters from the square in front of his office earlier than expected. But in doing so, he also tempted them into another demonstration, sooner than even they themselves had anticipated.

The cynicism of deploying toxic substances unnecessarily, which makes police violence disproportionate, should not be read as a sign of strength, but of weakness. The gas and the arbitrary arrests carried out by the police on Saturday night appeared to be nothing more than a continuation of Edi Rama’s speech in Parliament on Thursday—another exercise in hatred.

The third phase of this cycle followed on Sunday, with a social media post in which the Prime Minister branded the citizens he governs as “mercenaries” and “thugs.”

Rama has lost his nerve—the very composure normally expected of those who hold high public office and are supposed to preserve a minimum standard of public courtesy. A calm prime minister would not have reacted in this manner in any of these instances.

In all likelihood, this outburst—performed as if Rama were a Chechen commander somewhere deep in the Caucasus—has more to do with Rama himself than with the opposition. He senses that the system he built, and believed to be permanent, is no longer so. Two pillars he considered until recently to be his personal safeguards—structures from which he alone benefited—have now withdrawn, creating new balances.

These are the U.S. administration, which has shifted, let us say, into neutrality, and SPAK, which has demonstrated a new inclination to investigate corruption even within the Prime Minister’s own courtyard.

The opposition protest—significant both in numbers and in quality—now threatens to remove the third pillar on which Rama relied: controlled elections. A threatening opposition, combined with an at least neutral international community and a prosecutorial body willing to pursue corruption even when it reaches or incarnates itself in the Prime Minister, is more than Rama can tolerate.

He is accustomed to presiding over a system without competition, further guaranteed by those who publicly preach and supposedly safeguard open political contestation—the internationals and the courts. Now that these factors no longer stand on his side, Rama retreats into his Hobbesian (primordial) state, where he must become the Leviathan—the raging monster that fights “with its own.”

He is now realizing that the opposition was not weak for reasons intrinsic to the opposition itself.

Rama’s fury is tied to the reappearance of competition, a defining feature of democracy that he simply cannot endure. Politically, he has lived like the bullied who returns as the bully. His insistence that he is not a politician but an artist; that he is a master strategist in a chess game; that he is a hunter laying traps in the forest and delighting in watching animals fall into them—all this is nothing more than an attempt to mask the complex of the bullied transformed into the bully.

The opposition, for its part, must now add gas masks to its inventory of protest tools.