By Lorenc Vangjeli
Hardly anyone other than Edi Rama has been as clear about the path to power. Only Ahmet Zogu, Enver Hoxha and Sali Berisha form the other, far from sacred, trinity of Albanians with this kind of fixation, craving and immense lust for power in post-independence Albania. As different as they were, they were also alike in their biographies. What they shared marks extreme narcissism, deep egoism, dark charisma, total control over other centres of power, inevitable paranoia and a lack of empathy. And above all, they shared an endless loneliness. At the end of their careers they were completely alone: without ideological friends, but with a circle of brainless sycophants, abandoned by their old friends and in the company of the wrong ones.
All four shared a conviction of personal greatness and a belief that they were misunderstood geniuses. All four sincerely felt aggrieved by Albania’s modest borders, which they judged to be like a jacket that pinches at the shoulders. They were, some more, some less, very strong individuals, and before them society and Albania were at times a ridiculous kingdom, at times a cruel dictatorship and at times a hybrid democracy. Depending on the era, society and Albania turned for them into a chess game, a battlefield, a map to be divided, private property and accounts, or even a canvas on which they wanted to draw and impose only their personal will.
They regularly used one another like dominoes that topple each other. Apart from Zogu, who complained about his successor, all the others blamed their predecessors for their failures.
Hoxha crucified Zogu, Berisha cursed Hoxha, while Rama is still convinced that all the blame lies with Sali. The result was the same: a radicalisation of society and the creation of two camps that were more enemies than opponents. The portrait of one cannot be understood without noticing the traits of the other, and the actions of one cannot be explained without analysing the actions of the other, in a country where society as a whole was also culturally, emotionally and structurally a captive of the homeland of the one, the clan and the chieftain.
All four believed that the homeland was perfect as long as they themselves were its leaders, even that it existed only under that condition. All four were sincerely convinced that only chaos would enter the door behind their backs. By the irony of fate, that is indeed what happened. The chaos with the face of occupation came after Zogu’s flight; the profound upheaval, slightly delayed by Hoxha’s death; the near civil war after the departure of the first Berisha; and the political, institutional, moral and then economic crisis that will, it is said, take root in their house after Rama’s supposed departure. The history of the future must be read in what the past has already written. And the past shows that none of the 34 or 35 heads of the Albanian state had a happy and peaceful end. They either fell to a bullet, were locked in a cell, fled, or, after death, saw even their families destroyed.
Few politicians are remembered for how they came to power and how they administered it. People mostly remember them for the epilogue their power gave them. Hardly anyone notes Zogu’s efforts as a reformer in a country that had just emerged from the Middle Ages, his efforts to modernise the country and his attempts to secure unity in a deeply divided and terribly poor land. The former King of the Albanians is remembered only for his flight, without any personal resistance, a few hours before Fascist Italy occupied the country.
The correct orientation of Albanian communists toward the right side of history in the Second World War, alongside the antifascist Allies, the remarkable development of the country in the first years after liberation, and Hoxha’s efforts to modernise it, were all lost in the face of the extreme criminalisation of his criminal rule, the terrible class struggle, wretched poverty and the total isolation of the country. The guaranteed stability of the country in that period proved to be an artificial creation, given the total absence of democratic standards. Hoxha died in peace, but his phantom has certainly witnessed the imprisonment of his wife and son and the other nightmares of his family and circle.
If Berisha had kept the status of the one who departed in defeat in 2013 and had marked his irreversible epilogue there, he would surely not have experienced imprisonment in Mrs Liri’s salon, nor the shameful parade of being obliged to appear before the justice system. Rama is in the final minutes of deciding what he will do with his tomorrow. The presidency as a personal refuge, which both his friends and enemies hoped for, is now an unrealistic option. The dilemma without a solution, between the end of power that approaches with the crowd and power as an endless horror that sits in the office but does not govern, is his exclusive choice and solution. He has no one at his side to help him. He has chosen the personal loneliness of power, whose darkness prevents him from distinguishing and clearly recalling the countless portraits that, with heart, helped bring him to power and whom he abandoned in his good days. He turned them into enemies, and they watched in despair as he recruited new friends from the ranks of his old enemies. And so he proclaimed himself a king without a crown in the courtyard of his personal ZeqiLand, now with angry protesters inside his courtyard.