Rama brings West in Tirana, using Eastern premises

Alfred Lela

It cannot yet be said whether this is the end of Edi Rama. But the ends of those who indulge in excess are usually like this: ridiculous. The other ending—the tragic one—is generally reserved by history for tragic figures, and Albania's Prime Minister is not one of them.

After he, together with his minister Gonxhja—who first blossomed in the compost heap of Rama's first term at Tirana City Hall—assured the public that no public money would be spent on the Kanye West concert, things changed just hours before the fiasco unfolded. Under the new circumstances created by the civic protests, now entering their second month, Edi Rama finds himself compelled to act—not so much because of the famous and controversial singer, still less because of his legions of party operatives, but because of himself.

The collapse of the much-publicized concert, which he had also conceived as an anti-protest demonstration, would mark the end of the very genre through which he has governed Albania for thirteen years—and, before that, the capital for just as long. It must be said that, within this genre, he has excelled. And that has had less to do with creativity than with transgression.

Put differently, he never sought to create to improve. He sought to provoke, to confuse.

The collapse of the Kanye concert, and Rama's decision to inject €4 million to prevent its cancellation, is the closing act of that experiment. From this point on, Rama neither provokes nor confuses anymore. Everything has run its course: the axe-wielding theatrics; the dynamite during his very first week in office; the phrase, "You haven't seen anything yet"; the hanging garden at the Prime Minister's Office; the white sneakers and black briefs; the paint splashed across apartment blocks that later turned into apartment blocks piled upon apartment blocks; the façades bearing the map of Albania atop the tower of the duo that "gifted away" Albania; the self-portrait as Skanderbeg atop the tower in the city center; the "Intercontinental" skyscraper, built as a gesture of defiance toward Enver Hoxha's fifteen-story building—which resembles Dustin Hoffman's pinstriped suit in Papillon—and so on.

This extraordinary reversal of roles, in which Rama strains to create as an individual while thousands of individuals create against him, was always bound to happen one day. No one, however, foresaw the form it would take.

Rama has found himself stuck with this wild boar, squealing in the very mud from which he fashions his pots and pans in his bunker in Surrel. He invented the "anti-Semites" of the protest and then, to bring their "concert" to an end, invited to Tirana an anti-Semite like Kanye West—a performer whose concerts around the world have been cancelled for precisely that reason.

Only Rama could stumble into paradoxes such as these: a suffering boar and a contented Socrates.

Since our Prime Minister is so fond of parables drawn from the films of socialist realism, his Kanye concert resembles Tefta Tashko's performance in Concert in 1936. If the authorities in Lushnja found themselves trapped by that concert, Rama now finds himself with a protest-concert at his own doorstep. If the people in the film loved the singer while the local beys, the prefect and the commander opposed her, then our own "prefect" and "commander" must now bus in a crowd for Kanye's concert by force.

In the end, the Prime Minister of a country has become a concert promoter. Once, he provoked the public even with a local band like West Side Family. Now, not even Kanye West, with millions of fans around the world, can save him.

Yet even this late, even this deep into the crisis, he still does not seem to understand the meaning of excess. Still less does he understand that he himself has become the excess.