In a desperate attempt to find a thread of legitimacy, both at home and abroad, in the face of hundreds of thousands of Albanians who have been protesting for almost a month, Edi Rama has put into action both the latest propaganda assets and the old attack dogs.
The visit to Paris for a working lunch with President Macron, as well as the arrival in Tirana of former President Francois Hollande, constitute two acts that serve Rama to indirectly imply that there is no European rejection of him, despite the Zvërnec affair and the contestation of his regime by Albanian citizens.
Coincidence or the result of some feverish lobbying, these events tend to neutralize a kind of already known dissatisfaction of Berlin towards the corrupt government of Tirana. Given that France and Germany hold the main weight of the EU and have a significant role in the perspective of enlargement, Rama shows that at least one of them still enjoys support. At a time when the separation of Albania from Montenegro in the integration process could very soon become a reality, the Albanian prime minister hopes to buy time so that such a distancing does not occur during the time of the protests, which would galvanize them even more.
Even in a slightly more global picture, the meeting with two French presidents may take up little space amidst the flood of news about the political crisis, corruption, and drug money in Albania.
However, like everything that is undertaken in the heat of losing power, this French-scented PR has been drowned out by the heavy smell of sweat from the scoundrels who want to influence opinion in Albania. A wave of attacks since the 1990s (some of the characters did exactly the same thing in the service of Berisha in the period 1994-1997) have deprived Edi Rama of even that little space with a European look.
Fools and anonymous people from Albania and Kosovo, instead of helping him, are exposing Edi Rama as a typical Balkan politician who, when the end comes, clings to idiotic nationalisms with blood, war, freedom and symbols. And who?! Edi Rama! The same people who 30 years ago declared anyone who criticized Sali Berisha an agent, are now releasing lists of enemies and traitors who, by attacking Rama, are attacking Albania. Leaky old men, old lawyers who are beasts and young charlatans, journalists who once declare him a criminal and then an artist, are digging a pit for Rama, where he will fall, but the lowest form of the aesthetics of the word will remain as his epitaph.
In addition to the low and ridiculous quality of local propaganda, Edi Rama is being exposed by the desperate need to have as many public defenders as possible. And if at the international level he still maintains a kind of balance, here those who are coming to his aid are making him a disgrace and a black face. Crackheads who believe that the earth is flat, anonymous party members in Kosovo, peripheral figures from the diaspora, Sara and Zeqineja. The only serious supporter so far remains Taulant Balla, as far as he can be called serious. And Edi Rama seems all the more dull and old-fashioned, that only Dea Mishel's perfume on Facebook is enough to wipe away all the sweat and grease of Rama's lawyers. Not in vain, none of the well-known journalists close to the prime minister, although they have expressed reservations about the protest, have wanted to get dirty by standing next to a crumbling ruin.
The display of good relations with France and the miserable propaganda in Tirana are expressions at different levels of the same predicament of Edi Rama: the need to appear strong while the end has come. And the predicament of the autocrat in Tirana makes the Paris effect zero. Many of Rama's brothers have proven that syringes from abroad are no salvation when political death comes. ©lapsi.a l
