By Lorenc Vangjeli

Once, about 10 years ago, Edi Rama testified about a habit of his: “…I take a taxi after midnight and tell the taxi driver, “Speak now!” According to the former Rama, the truths told by the occasional taxi driver were even more reliable than reports from the World Bank or the EU. Former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, two years before Rama, had gone further with the taxi driver fable. He had disguised himself as a taxi driver, with glasses and hidden cameras on board, and had attempted to measure the pulse of citizens in relation to his policies. It is not known what the taxi drivers after midnight told Rama, but the Norwegians, when they realized that their prime minister was at the wheel, did not spare their dissatisfaction with the way he drove the car. The man who would later become NATO Secretary General, then said the famous joke: “…the Norwegians would be better off with me as prime minister than with me serving them as taxi driver". Rama can also become NATO secretary, but he cannot become a taxi driver in Tirana. He does not have a driving license.

It doesn't matter whether this old habit of Rama's is true or not, whether it was an original idea or an adaptation of the former Norwegian prime minister's election campaign, whether he traveled at midnight in a random taxi or used an innocent and playful lie as an element of public communication. In both cases, Rama and Stoltenberg - former Dutch prime minister and current NATO chief Mark Rutte has done the same thing - have needed authentic testimony from citizens. They have sought a social barometer to tell them the kind of truths that, due to the fact that their office is surrounded by a handful of people with changing interests, have less and less chance of reaching their ears without being distorted along the way.

Rama is obsessed with polls. He is also on the move and often meets all kinds of categories of citizens. But are these two instruments sufficient to truly understand the pulse of Albanian society? To understand its needs, expectations and dissatisfactions? Polls have their margin of error. Over time, they can also acquire the tendency to say what their patrons themselves like to hear. Rama's public communications are also often like a one-way street, where his voice is heard drowning out even the voices that are buzzing in his ears. From the dark car windows, from the office windows, from the unusual length of time in power, from the disconnection from the everyday life of the common man, from the iron siege with an ever smaller handful of people, from the insensitive hostage-taking that makes the fist of inseparable serviles like no other army in the world, from the personal selection to believe beautiful lies in the face of bitter truths, from the chosen confrontation with the intellectual quota of ZeqiLand, from the failure to consider the desperate need to have critical people around, so, for all this complex of factors, without excluding the distance and fatigue that Rama himself has created with everyday life in Albania, the prime minister now has every possible risk of living in a different reality from that of ordinary Albanians. To live on a different planet from them and to revolve in an orbit of loneliness, escape and the conviction that others can no longer understand him.

No survey, nor even a single taxi driver, doctor or psychologist, can explain why there is so much dissatisfaction among Albanian citizens. How stressed they are. How they start the day cursing and can't fall asleep without cursing everyone and everything. Even those who count pennies, even those who have earned millions. There is no painter who can explain why everyone is so gloomy in their portraits. It seems as if most Albanians, on foot or by car, have just returned from a funeral and the rest are rushing to go to another funeral. How many people in Tirana and elsewhere look like a loaded gun ready to fire. From nerves, from impatience, from being filled with the poison and malice that everyone produces against everyone else. It is difficult to simply explain why Albanians, although richer than before, are today a tragically unhappy people.

Two videos of a few seconds that have made a name for themselves in the virtual space are enough to urgently hear the scream that seems silent for the moment, but that could be terrible tomorrow. In the first, two young men massacre a defenseless man with kicks and in the second, an elderly woman is thrown directly into the jaws of the criminal procedure. In the first case, the prosecution has not taken any substantial action for five months in a case that should have ended directly in court. But when the investigation is dismissed, guilt is cut off regardless of the thickness of the oppression. In the second case, the elderly woman will have to be punished, because the law in Albania is hell for weak and poor people like her. These are among those episodes that can serve as a scanner for all the problems of society, governance and the very mentality of 'buy a day and live', which never dies in Albania. Unresolved property problems, carried, torn apart, alienated and robbed, institutions that do not function, police and justice that either side with the strong, or sleep and become co-sharers with the rich. Poor who understand that poverty is the most serious crime in Albania, while the rich can buy the right themselves. And Rama? What would the man who above all should have been the guarantor of the two victims shown in the video say? Empathy and duty should have made him an ally with them and one with the weak. In words, he would undoubtedly say exactly this. But his model has changed over the years. As he himself could honestly testify to the midnight taxi driver: "Listen now! The problem is not as simple as 707 pots screaming and 1001 windows creaking. Those two citizens who are protesting are a burden to bear. The aggressors are investors. They create jobs. They build resorts. The resorts bring tourists. The tourists will take pictures. They post the pictures on Instagram. And Instagram goes crazy with the captions: "What a miracle Albania is!". And then? Then it's another matter to dare not accept the colorful world of Instagram. Then the Republic of ZeqiLand, still outside the EU, but a member of this cheerful family, just has to wait for Albanians to believe in the magic of colors. Then you just have to go to the periodic elections to vote "Not the best possible, but the lack of a better offer than this. "There's nothing better than what they have, then!"