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OP-ED

Tuesday, October 13: Generation versus Degeneration

Politiko 2026-10-14 09:39:00
Tuesday, October 13: Generation versus Degeneration

Alfred Lela

Tuesday, October 13, as though ill fortune had been foretold by the sequence of the number and the name of the day, proved a day of terrible misfortune for Edi Rama's great degeneration. It came face to face with the new generation, revealing itself for what it is: an ageing, scarecrow regime, a police force of (ab)use of power, staffed with party patronage operatives, swept aside by the fists of anger of a young man in his early twenties from Gjirokastra.

The degeneration appeared before Albania in its true face, dominated by the Minotaur-like head of Ervin Demo, the former university lecturer transformed by the obesity of power into his master's steward, a dog who, having once felt the stick himself, now turns it into a whip against those who dare to resist. Against the very kind of people to whom, before the fat reached his conscience, he used to preach that youngsters must rise up when power degenerates. (Ah, forgive me, that must have been during Berisha's time and the era of his "sins", and that lesson no longer applies to the degeneRama!)

Demo is a case study in himself, because he explains the relationship between the Albanian "intellectual" and power, and brings to mind another of his kind, also a product of the intelligentsia, Sandër Lleshaj. Both exposed their inadequacies through power, which, once it fell into their hands, they treated like a child treats a toy, breaking not only the instrument entrusted to them but themselves as well.

The degeneration could not be explained without the policemen, examples of the widespread misconception that the state is a whip in the hand of whoever gives you your bread, rather than an instrument that passes from hand to hand while remaining there to protect everyone from anyone's excesses. The tying of student Klevi Meta, who had challenged them with nothing more than his bare hands, to the railings of the Ministry of Education was the photographic record of a medieval act, right in the middle of a country whose head of government repeats like a robot: "Either we get Albania into Europe by 2030, or I drop dead!"

(Europe was tied to the railings on Durrës Street yesterday, in a scene even more epic than Europa on the back of Zeus, transformed into a white bull, crossing the waves of the Aegean.)

The degeneration revealed itself yesterday, above all and as always, on the shortwave frequencies of the political commentariat, made uncomfortable by the strap of the government's thong wedged between the buttocks of those who cannot live without the government's intestine, and who turn that very intestine into a megaphone of venom against anyone who exposes the government that feeds their privileges for what it really is: a bloated bowel of greed that can never be satisfied. They complained about violence turned upside down: not the violence of the police, armed and protected from their toes to their teeth, but that of a handful of young people whose only weapons were their fists and their anger.

The degeneration was also in Luxembourg yesterday, in the delegation headed by Rama, clinging to the idea of Europe as an escape route from the Tehran he has built in Tirana. Grasp the irony of history: the generation of 1990 proclaimed in the squares of Tirana, "We want Albania to be like the rest of Europe!" The contemporaries of that generation have taken to the streets today, shouting, "Rama, resign!" — precisely as an indictment of the Prime Minister's idea of the EU: a fake Potemkin village designed to stupefy Albania, not to Europeanise it.

Tuesday was full of degenerates, but the day belonged to the generation. The lesson delivered by those who are still studying the textbooks of school and of the world was clear to everyone: when elites fail, new ones are forged on the anvil of a confrontation that demands courage.

Just as in December 1990, when it took the youth to light the fire that awakened the elites.

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