Adela Halo | BIRN
In Albania, it is commonly said that Rama is a thief, but a good one. A strategist. A few steps ahead of his rivals. Yes, he has indeed aligned the party, the Parliament, the media, eliminated the opposition, controls the terrain with patronage agents and criminals, fascinates internationals and the people with spectacular propaganda tools, mocks people, and so on. And what is it that he governs with scandals, jokes and caricatures? He has won his fourth mandate. Anyone who cannot swallow the fact that success is unscrupulous is simply naive, or worse: a moralist to cover up his own incompetence. But for people with cold logic and disenchanted by fairy tales with morality, the fact is that he is good.
This is no longer just about Rama. This is also about Balluku, and this is also about Erion Veliaj, Elisa Spiropali, and many, many others who have fallen from grace. This is actually also about Berisha, but it is generally judged that Rama has surpassed everyone in this ability and has become a model. Anyone who criticizes him simply has a problem that he cannot overcome.
This type of political skill is widely known as Machiavellianism, thanks to the infamous book The Prince by the 16th-century Florentine diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. In it, Machiavelli writes that to seize or maintain power, a prince must be willing to be both lion and fox: to know when to use force and when to use cunning, and not hesitate to use both.
It is foolish for a prince to seek to be good in a world full of tricksters and traitors. So it is foolish to be moral in the face of Berisha. It is also foolish to want to be generous or gentle and peaceful, because generosity raises the expectations of the population and leads to bankruptcy, while gentleness simply delays conflict until you may have lost your advantage, or prolongs suffering in the name of peace. Also, although it is good to be loved, a prince is safer if he is feared. People's love is fleeting. Fear is a more stable force. The path of goodness and virtue in the classical sense is the path of ruin. The path of success is that of another kind of virtue that Machiavelli does not define, but illustrates - the ability to force and cunning. In short, what matters is to be skillful, to achieve the goal, even if you steal, threaten, deceive, oppress, etc. These are only judged when you lose.
Rama's political behavior has often been labeled as Machiavellian. But a more careful reading of Machiavelli and the situation leads us to a different conclusion.
First, Machiavelli distinguishes republics from principalities at the beginning of the book, and goes on to specify that he is writing about principalities. Albania is a democratic republic, and a legitimate question is whether the means of power in a democratic republic can be the same as those of principalities. Princely orders – characterized by blood-based hierarchies and the inheritance of power – are governed by completely different principles from those of democratic republics, where the principle of freedom prevails, where power is distributed and controllable. One might say that this specification is not enough, since essentially, the nature of power does not change with the type of order. Power is power, both in a principality and in a republic. In all systems there are rivals who must be weakened, defeated, and politically eliminated. In all systems you have to be both strong and cunning.
But in all systems there is also a force, which, although often invisible, dictates the place even to princes. This force is public opinion.
Even the prince, according to Machiavelli, cannot ignore public opinion. Fear can indeed be more effective than love, but sowing hatred is fatal for the prince, and for anyone. Love is not enough because people forget the good, but they do not forget the crimes and wounds of great injustices. Sowing hatred in their souls acts as a constant threat to power. Therefore, says Machiavelli, the prince may not need to be really good, but he needs to appear so, because even in the principality there is a moral order that regulates the relations between the people and the prince. Ignoring this order always has a cost.
I can't say how much hatred Rama and his courtiers have sown in Albania, given that – for all the reasons – the election result is what we saw. But eight days of protests, the continuous hemorrhage of Albanians towards emigration, and endless conversations with lots and lots of Albanians living in Albania, clearly speak of a deep anger and disgust with him and the entire feudal and unscrupulous model he has built. Disgust, anger, a sense of injustice, indignation — these are passions as threatening to any government as hatred.
Indignation shakes any kind of power. Ignoring or mocking it is a lying luxury that even the greatest delirious person cannot enjoy for long. That is why every non-partisan protest of these years – about chemical weapons, about students, about Klodian Rasha – has had a result, full or partial. Rama knows this, which is why he seeks to exhaust the strength of the current protests by talking about 'fabricated indignation' by 'professional merchants of indignation' and trying every possible machination – with Serbs, Greeks, Iranians, and gays – just so that his project, which does not exist because it is being projected, is not to be ruined under any circumstances. Just so that he can maintain power to plunder the country.
In addition to public opinion, Machiavelli sets another limit to the machinations of power, defining not one but two goals for the prince: the preservation of power and glory. Glory is not a secondary goal for the leader, but a goal that limits even the first, the preservation of power. This becomes especially clear when Machiavelli discusses Agathocles of Syracuse and Oliverotto of Fermo. Agathocles of Syracuse came to power by ensnaring and killing by surprise the entire elite of Syracuse, thus leaving him without any rivals or opponents. Oliverotto of Fermo also came to power after a similar massacre: he killed all the notables of Fermo and his own uncle who had raised him, terrorized what was left of the institutions, and declared himself absolute prince. These cunning traps followed by bloody massacres seem in line with the Machiavellian virtue of mastery.
'But', Machiavelli writes, 'to kill one's own citizens, to betray one's friends, to be unfaithful, merciless, and unfaithful cannot be called a virtue; by these methods one can attain power, but not glory.' Agathocles of Syracuse remained in power until his death, but his cruelty and crimes, says Machiavelli, deny him a place among the glorious names of history. Oliverotto, on the other hand, had an end similar to that which he reserved for his rivals: he was kidnapped and murdered, in accordance with the model he himself had set.
The examples Machiavelli uses are horrific, drawn from much more barbaric centuries of human history. Edi Rama has not cut the throats of his rivals. And anyway, not killing and beheading like Agathocles of Syracuse seems an extremely low standard for making a good name.
But in modern times, just as you don't have to fight like Alexander the Great to secure a glorious place in history, you don't have to kill to lose this chance. You lose it when you leave behind a balance of ordinary abilities. The incinerators, the health concessions, the 5D file, the roads and the ARRSH, the EU funds for agriculture, the affairs of the AKSHI, are all simply thefts sold as development.
The glory of modern times takes on more state-building, economic, cultural, and architectural forms. Especially in post-communist states, history will seek to recognize leaders who not only luckily threw at them a historical moment like the fall of communism, who not only managed to seize the reins of power, but who built the new order: the democratic republic that was sought. The glory of modern times will be reserved for those who build a democratic culture freed from the vice of spying, from the ghosts of foreign agencies, capable of accepting freedom and the challenges that it always poses to power. The inglorious list of those who have oppressed Albania is full. There are empty places to make a name only on the list of those who have emancipated it. For those who can get the votes and cheers of a free people, not for the masters of theft, oppression, and swindling.
On the economic level, it is hard to say that you can occupy a glorious place in history as the standard-bearer of a bandit state that takes from the poor to give to the rich, as the one who plundered the public loot, expropriated at will, made laws for private names to create an economy of oligarchs and servants. In culture, I do not know what glory can be expected from a government that after thirteen years in power, today leads a country full of towers with the refined aesthetics of a can, but without a national theater (for six years), without a historical museum, nor a national gallery, nor a decent national library, nor much else. What Albanian artists or intellectuals achieve on their own, despite all the difficulties they encounter, is their merit, not Rama's or his court's. Ajola Xoxa, yes, can make a name for herself as the sponsor of a work of art in a garbage field where her husband covered up a gruesome crime.
The modern glory that Rama seeks is evident in the rhetoric about state formation, a modern administration, an AI minister, strategic investments, elite tourism, urban development. But who lives in Albania has understood that the rhetoric of 'Renaissance' was only a machination. What remains of Rama's governments after he removes the machinations? A culture of bandits and thugs.
Serious events and developments have marked the collective conscience in recent years. Not everyone has been sensitive to each event, but taken together they form the picture of a degraded, unscrupulous, treacherous, greedy and insatiable political class, ignorant, wise but sloppy, insensitive and contemptuous of the majority of Albanians.
Machiavellianism, understood crudely and built into the system, introduced criminals into the Albanian Parliament and into the municipalities – even when there were no other rivals in the elections! This political class of Machiavellian aspirants imprisoned poor people for a light bill and kicked old women who sold oregano, while making laws according to the needs of the oligarchs. Thanks to this system, a citizen was dragged away and raped by private security forces who surrounded a public property, while the State Police stood by. Thanks to this system, a diagnosis of cancer turns into a death sentence in Albania. This political class has demanded that Albanians swallow the murder of four people on the boulevard, dozens of others in Gërdec, the rise to power of criminals, the cannabization of the country, expropriation, extortion, oppression, and finally ridicule.
It is impossible to list them all, but these few events are enough to awaken the memory and to highlight the picture: years of gluttony, oppression, violence, contempt, and voting with their feet. A gluttony so immense and so self-assured that they did not even bother to cover it up. An oppression so rampant, a contempt so unbridled. A sick insistence on subjugating everyone.
Eight days of protests have shown that this Machiavellianism, far from glory, created a bandit state, produced servile and slaves of the prince and their gluttony, but also disgust, anger, indignation and rebels. Stripping power of any moral semblance also gives rise to all kinds of extremism. All these forms of rebellion are on the scene these days. Because the total absence of any moral axis in politics is unbearable, and leads to the search for an axis elsewhere. Someone finds it in the ideal of the democratic republic, someone in religion, and someone in nationalism, and so on. Therefore, the banners of these days vary from demands for accountability and satirical 'memes', to 'bullets for traitors'.
Social orders are necessarily moral orders, because people cannot live together without notions and rules of justice. An openly unscrupulous policy is disorienting and will always produce resistance. If it does not recognize its own red lines — if it does not accept institutions to keep it on track and if it does not recognize the calls of public opinion — it risks leading the country to violence.
The Machiavelli of endless machinations may tempt anyone who seeks to clothe his thievery in the garb of a philosopher. But Machiavelli's own Machiavellianism has limits: power is maintained by respecting the moral order that holds people together in society and is exercised with the aim of glory, not gluttony, a completely commonplace vice. Rama's glory would be, after thirteen years, a free, just, and prosperous Albania. The prime minister's embarrassment is that eight days of protests are writing another end to it.
