A Dictator for Gen Z

Alfred Lela

"Edi Rama is not corrupt," declared today a Kosovar Albanian, recently repackaged in Tirana, for urgent needs, as a political analyst. Kosovars know a thing or two about corruption: they are almost universally opposed to Albin Kurti, the one Albanian politician who can be accused of many things — except corruption.

Thus, they support Rama because he is supposedly not corrupt, while opposing Kurti because, apparently, they wish he were. A joke in itself: oppositionists in Pristina, government loyalists in Tirana. As the saying goes, no one is a prophet in his own village.

They are endlessly amusing: like the King's musketeers, defending a monarch who, to be fair, never lacks enemies, real or imagined, from within and without. Even from Kosovo, where not a few regard them as a threat themselves, though perhaps they are merely harbingers of bad luck.

Then there is the jack-of-all-trades politician, the type who, lacking any particular talent that distinguishes him, becomes a tin-plated middleman, playing the strongman, the intellectual, and the manager all at once. Such a figure can hardly avoid becoming an imitator. He ends up doing exactly what Edi does.

Rama transformed the "Photo of the Day" into the "Message of the Day" — essentially the same thing with a minor variation. Once, he sent us carefully staged images of Albania he had supposedly fixed. Now he circulates messages of sympathy addressed to himself, from an imaginary people designed to replace the real people who gather every night on the Boulevard to protest against him.

The formula is simple. He tells them, in effect, "I salute your mothers!" and they answer, "Charge ahead, father!" What can you do? Rama's followers are a people who love their Tsar — or rather, their King.

The burden of misunderstanding the protest movement has aged the Leader. In appearance, but especially in communication.

Once, he created the memes himself, the nostalgic reminiscences, the irony, the podcasts, the vlogs, the Photos of the Day, the grand proposals, the concerts, the symbolic kneelings, and everything else. For three weeks now, the protests have been doing all of that better than he can. They have deprived him even of the one thing he truly mastered: dismissing the people while inventing a new, managed people in their place. While doing so, he found time to paint and write progressive incantations.

Every night, the protesters compose a new angle from which Rama is forced to see in himself what he always hated in others. The many stage managers who once held up flattering mirrors before him can no longer shield him. He hates that crowd with a passion, perhaps because it reminds him, however faintly, of who he once was — a man with youth ahead of him and a future to pursue.

Now he is a tired man, exhausted by the collapse of the illusion that neither Albania nor the Albanian people can do without him.

Not only that. They want him out even if no clear alternative is waiting in the wings.

His old gesture — "I may no longer be the best, but there is no one better than me" — now hangs awkwardly in the air. Just as an actor often struggles to know what to do with his hands on stage, Rama no longer knows what to do with his finger.

A finger, after all, can only meet the fate of a finger. You may point it at others for a long time, but eventually, accumulated anger multiplies into thousands of fingers pointing back.

And now Edi stands exposed. He can no longer hide behind the finger.

His latest humiliation is the invention of mysterious conspiracies and foreign agents allegedly plotting his downfall. Enver Hoxha tormented Albania for forty years with precisely this obsession.

That is why Rama looks older than ever.

The man who once mocked paranoia has become its vessel.

An Enver facing Gen Z.