The heavy weight of a system

2025-02-22 10:34:00, Opinione Pëllumb Nako

The arrest of the mayor of Tirana has highlighted frightening developments, characteristic of a state still far, far from the proper democratic parameters. Sometimes clearly and sometimes more faintly, a multitude of phenomena come to light, indicators of the serious wounds from which the Albanian state and society suffer. And this only after a scratch that SPAK has recently made through the arrest in question.

SPAK prosecutors do not have the opportunity to cause the overthrow of an illegal autocratic system, which is being built more and more every day, through their investigations. The prosecutors have only done a scratch on the wound. That was enough and these days a group of them are under a barrage of discredit that is trying to cause them civilian death.

We are increasingly encountering public positions from a multitude of politicians, media and art world figures who are persistently seeking to bury, bury two meters under the ground, those few state employees who, due to their lack of corruption, have just begun to disrupt the great games of power, thus jeopardizing the balances of a rotten system that dominates Albanian life.

We are not dealing with a mafia system, as is commonly used in numerous analyses by political scientists, but we are at the level of a state that has embraced mafia methods in governance, influencing its mafia-like nature.

If we were to summarize what is happening in fewer words, what was said above would be clear. A mayor, i.e. an elected official, and the entire dome of his municipality, i.e. high levels of administration, are arrested for money laundering, concealment of income, and corruption.

The crime was committed in collaboration with each other and with businessmen, exchanging favors for mutual, illegal family benefits that lead to the misuse of public money and its laundering.

This fact, already investigated by the justice system, proves a criminal collaboration between an elected official and businessmen, as well as a group of senior administration officials and businessmen. This collaboration legally proves, not only as a perception, the existence of a phenomenon that in mafia language is called "family, friends and friends of friends."

For this alloy to turn into a system, conformist artists, poets, singers, public figures, and politicians who support the system because they have benefited financially in the form of clientelism appear on the scene. And this category constitutes the drama of where Albanian society is heading. No matter how "monster" a ruler with executive power may be, he would never be able to cause great damage to society alone.

The worst is caused by conformists who feel satisfied with the crumbs of power and do not want to lose them at any cost, where the price of selling the soul is cheaper. If in clientelism with oligarchs it is a question of "hard" corruption, where money flows through all sorts of channels, with conformists it is a question of "soft" corruption.

If SPAK has to fight "hard" corruption, Albanian society has to deal with "soft" corruption. It seems that Albanian society is not yet strong enough to fulfill this mission. Meanwhile, the political class, in addition to mudslinging, has rushed to prepare legal reforms to neutralize SPAK.

This is because SPAK is shaking this balance. Businessmen, elected politicians, their families, high levels of the administration immersed in illegal affairs, supported by conformists of all stripes as well as by the lower part of the administration threatened for their livelihoods, constitute a heavy stone to move.

In fact, in this context, if we were to refer to former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, we would remember how many, many processes have been opened against him, even during electoral campaigns.

He fought with justice, adopted laws, bought and sold, but for no moment did he take any step to "remake" Italian justice or to put it under control, despite the dissatisfaction with it. Meanwhile, the Albanian political class continues to be characterized by the serious chronic disease of the breakdown of institutions, of going back, of reconceptualizing them. The instability of institutions kills their legitimacy by distancing themselves from citizens and leaving space for the archaic power traditionally inherited, whose power lies precisely in its immutability.

Another indicator of this mafia-like system are the accused themselves who are prosecuted. In all high-ranking political processes, including those of the Municipality of Tirana, silence prevails and it is clearly evident that in cases of high-level corruption, there is a lack of justice collaborators.

In a developed Western country, where we claim to be a part of in 2030, this absence is considered as obvious proof that the state has lost credibility. Whereas what is currently happening with SPAK exceeds this dimension, going from a sign of hostile attitude to an open behavior of the state against the institution it has itself established. Such a thing has its source at the very level of Albanian democracy.

The Albanian state and the rulers of this country are currently at the right time in their encounter with the worldly fashion of luxury, but they are very far away in their encounter with the modern institutions of a developed, not primitive country. Concretely , Albanian institutions even now after many, many reforms suffer from the weakness of functioning due to a still immature democracy, dominated by the primitive clan mentality of force.

This is because the phenomena struck by SPAK and the reaction to them prove that the Albanian state derives from a democracy that is not naturally functional, but from a so-called numerical democracy, which functions only on numbers. Such a democracy is nothing more than the antechamber of despotism and oligarchic degeneration.

Essentially, through criminal proceedings, SPAK seems to be highlighting that high-level corruption in Albania is not simply about a deviation of those in power, because in such a case, we would be dealing with isolated individuals, as the arrested often try to present themselves, and among them there would also be some repentant ones.

Whereas the corruption that is being ascertained has to do with a culture of exercising power accepted in its entirety, naturally, by the political ruling class to subjugate the lower strata of Albanian society. The infection is deep and SPAK alone is unable to cure it./ CNA