The three candidates from Tirana, and how the DP is making the SP look, once again, like the Labor Party

Alfred Lela

The appearance of the three Democratic Party candidates for Tirana's primaries in "Opinion" on Thursday was the political postcard with the strongest political message in recent years. Ilir Alimehmeti, Belind Kelliçi, and Gert Bogdani made the Democratic Party of Sali Berisha, who is suspected by his critics, especially because of his age, look young, vibrant, and re-founded.

Although individually the 'three tenors' did not have any brilliance where you could stop to say "this is the winner", or "this is the new mayor", they completed a picture of freedom and the self-confidence that comes from freedom, which has not been seen for at least a decade in Albanian politics.

All three are younger than the current Mayor, who is meanwhile the youngest politician in the Socialist Party and is seen as the successor of Edi Rama, the DP's supporters made last night the political opponent look like the Labor Party in front of the newly founded party Democratic, 32 years ago.

Coincidentally or not, even then in the newly founded party of young people, workers, and intellectuals, elections were held several times in a short time to reach president Sali Berisha. The Labor Party had just emerged from the 9th Congress, which it had called a succession. Ramiz Alia, an antique in his own right, looked like a boy in the general postcard of the commies. It took the "restoration" in the 10th Congress, and the arrival at the head of Fatos Nano and a bunch of middle-aged men, to somewhat soften the territorial texture of the Labor Party, whose political prostate had fallen.

Despite this 'perestroika', the APS transformed into the Socialist Party, amid a great noise and premonition, which did not escape even the poet Dritëror Agolli, compared to Berisha, Pashko, Imamim, Hajdar, Zogaj, Pollo, Selam, and others seemed a storm.

Not at all surprising, in fact, if you consider the times of that time, which today, in a higher concentration of terminology, are called "context".

The surprise happened today when the man who took over, to reform it for the second time, a Socialist Party that seems to be closing its first cycle, Edi Rama, returned it to where he took it, not from the hands of Fatos Nano, but from Ramiz Ali. .

Although they may not be similar in form, Rama's current SP and ALP are approaching similarity like two drops of water. Rama is getting old and impatient like an Eastern patriarch and jokes are his only political offering. But the similarity begins and becomes typical in two elements: in the SP there is no longer an open race, there is no competition, there are no elections, and there is only a rush to please the president. Those who come out of this scheme end up on the margins, like Fatmir Xhafaj, Mimi Kodheli, and others. This "decline in elections" in the SP is less dramatic if you compare it with an almost tragic element: the inability of the leadership of this party to grasp the causes of depopulation, the desire and urgency of the Albanians to leave their homeland and take to the streets of the world in ways similar to 1991-1992, and forgotten since the 2000s.

The numbers are alarming and come from reliable international sources, but Rama is blind to this and chooses to freely explain the mass exodus of the people he has to govern.

Even on this point, he resembles the Labor Party, which in 1990-1992 was interested in the youth and workers fleeing, thus freeing the country from a valve of pressure and revolt. With this insurgent band gone, the Labor Party, turned Socialist, could once again control power. Edi Rama will probably have to do the same calculations: the emptying of the country in favor of personal and party power.

It must be said that, at this point, the Democratic Party has no merit, given that for 9 years it has been a pale copy of the ways of power.

But something seems to be moving. Three boys competing to enter the Tirana challenge were a good comeback card last night.

As for her, how Edi Rama took the SP to turn it into a European Labor party of the "third way", and turned it back into the honor of Ramiz Ali, this may be a surprise but not a mystery. Long marriage to evil produces nothing but the recycling of evil.