E fundit!

22:51 TODAY

Businessman Artur Shehu breaks his silence: I am a long-time land owner in Zvërnec, I don't know the investors at all

Albanian businessman Artur Shehu spoke on the Opinion show...

From false transition to collective depression

2025-12-19 15:11:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

For more than three decades, Albanians have been told that we are “going through a transition.” Then the term changed to “protracted transition,” a nebulous phrase that justified every failure, every injustice, every delay.

The transition became the perfect alibi of an incompetent and greedy political class. But today, it is clear: Albanians are no longer living a prolonged transition. They are experiencing the collapse of democracy and a multiple depression: economic, political, social and, above all, psychological.

Economically, the country is no longer simply poor; it is tired. Exhausted. Work does not ensure a dignified life, the salary does not cover living expenses, saving is a luxury, while the future is an increasingly abstract concept. Young people no longer flee from poverty, but from a lack of hope. Escape has become a vital project for salvation. A society that produces only immigrants is no longer in transition, it is in disintegration.

Politically, the depression is even deeper. Democracy has been emptied of meaning. Elections no longer inspire enthusiasm. The vote is not seen as a means of change, but as a routine. Parties no longer represent ideas and hopes for change, but interests, clans and individuals. The political class has been the same for over three decades, unchanged, without elite turnover and without rotation. Albanians have become spectators of an absurd theater, where actors change roles in the same scenario.

Socially, Albanian society is shrinking. Solidarity is being replaced by indifference, faith by doubt, and hope by cynicism. The family bears the burden of an absent state, while school, culture, and education gradually lose their emancipatory role. Public models are vulgar, noisy, empty. The models that are promoted are false, fast, effortless, and valueless. This is not a crisis of values; it is their destruction. Because an ignorant and valueless society is easier to rule.

But the most severe blow, the most dangerous depression is the psychological one. A collective fatigue, a widespread feeling of helplessness, a silent conviction that “nothing changes”. Albanians are tired of hoping. They have become accustomed to injustice, have accepted mediocrity and have normalized humiliation and self-abasement. Albanians laugh ironically, speak angrily, but act less and less. They protest less and less and give up more quickly. Unfortunately, Albanian society is now a society that has lost self-confidence and has lowered expectations to a minimum.

Transition presupposes movement, hope for arrival. Depression, on the contrary, is stagnation, darkness and surrender. And decay. Today's Albania is not going anywhere; it is not on a path towards something; it is spinning in place, tired of unfulfilled promises and of the past that constantly returns with new faces, which, in fact, are the same. Those who govern us are afraid of change, while Albanians are tired of disappointment. Collective depression is the most efficient weapon of power: citizens without hope are obedient citizens.

Getting out of this situation requires a moral, psychological and civic rebirth. The restoration of dignity, faith and hope. Because a society in depression is more at risk than a society in transition. And today, Albanians no longer have the luxury of being deceived by words: they must face reality, in order to change it.