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OP-ED

The opposition table and the challenger tables

Politiko 2026-01-11 10:55:44
The opposition table and the challenger tables

Alfred Lela

That Albania is full of “intellectuals” who continue to be regarded as such even though the last book they read was in university—and even then it was a textbook—is well known. It is also well known that here an “intellectual” is anyone with a university diploma, even though diplomas have become like Botox injections, now offered even by dentists.

What is neither well known nor clearly understood is that a (public) intellectual rests on three premises: first, they are connected to creative activity and actually practice it—through writing, the arts, or academia; second, they have a public voice and are not ivory-tower thinkers; and third, they align the ideal of the word with the ideal of action.

From theory, let us descend into practice—specifically to the dialogue table convened by opposition leader Sali Berisha, and to the reaction of the “intellectuals” toward it. I will use the word intellectual in quotation marks because all of the commentators—Lubonja excepted—I classify (forgive my prejudice) as proletarians of the word: a species cultivated by the internet with its universality, neutrality, and web-ness. Put plainly: they have mouths and tongues, social-media pages, podcasts recorded in bedrooms, they teach in Tirana’s semi-universities or in the provinces—but they are not intellectuals. They do not create. They repeat the same clichés, the same images, the same theatrical props of thought and action. When they fail to break into the mainstream, they jump into the conspiracy markets. The goal is one: to enter the center through extremes—not through creation, but through shock.

Why did these “intellectuals” latch onto the opposition’s roundtable, each from their own angle of eccentricity? Because they await crises as saviors of their relevance. They hope that amid turbulence, they might move from the margins to the center. Their instinct is correct: only crises rescue extremists. In times of calm, they are nothing more than psychological knots seeking somewhere to unravel. Perceiving the opposition as being in crisis, they grow confused when they are not publicly summoned by name to grace the table—not as equals, not as contributors, but as saviors. In their tangled minds, they envision an aula magna where, even if they are not at the head, the roundness of the table creates the illusion that they are. It is the dream of donkeys who imagine themselves knights—hence seated at a primus inter pares table with King Arthur.

If one pays attention to their reactions—illogical as all extremes are—they articulate a grievance according to which it was Sali Berisha who invited them, and this, supposedly, invalidates the invitation. Oh? Then who should have invited them? Pëllumbi, the Democratic Party’s receptionist? The Holy Spirit? Donald Trump, God forbid?

It is not the invitation, nor its form, that troubles them. It is the need to invent and fight an imaginary battle—to have windmills turning so their balloons of illusion might stay aloft. In their agitation, they fantasize about the horizons toward which the great opposition body should march, and the vertical leaps it must perform to get there.

One says: I was invited, but I didn’t go. Another: I was invited, I went, but I didn’t like it because the table was rectangular, not like King Arthur’s, where, no matter where I sat, I would be at the center. And here we arrive at the difference between people who are public accidents and intellectuals: their relationship to the center. The former, unable to withstand solitude or incoherence, understand the center as themselves and their hallucinations. The latter seek to place ideas at the center, but are comfortable even when that center revolves around other ideas. They do not see their visions as universal truths, but as part of an internal creative process. If they are not accepted, they move on to something else.

I do not expect my personal distaste for these “intellectuals” to mean anything to them. But their contrast with others at the table should explain something. Amid the absence of a hundred and one whims, the bought of a thousand and one accounts, the freeloaders of a million and one “we’ll see when the time comes,” the anti-opposition media brought to the foreground the unhinged in search of the center. Yet at the table sat dozens of people engaged in genuine creative processes, each in their own field—artists, authors, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, clerics, and others.

None were highlighted, because government-aligned media, as always, held up to their mirrors only the grinning faces, the Olios' and Stelios. That these “intellectuals of stick and rope” also helped reinforce this perception only proves that the alliance of banality triumphs more easily in the age of the internet.

We may not be able to stop it—but at the very least, we can explain it. And ridicule it.

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