FLASH
Shkruar nga Lorenc Vangjeli
The first person who should calmly read this decision is Prime Minister Rama.
With the decision to suspend the elections in Tirana, the Constitutional Court disappointed skeptics who see it case after case as simply an extension of Edi Rama's power. Although the court has brought many doubts about its professional and moral integrity, and has demonstrated itself to be powerless in the face of the majority that has ignored it in several cases, its latest decision was a lesson in the normal functioning of the system.
A lesson in respecting the basic constitutional principles of balance and control between powers. And much more than that: for those who can read beyond a seemingly simple act of decision-making, the decision was also a political lesson that opposing sides should take note of and pay attention to.
The first person who should calmly read this decision is Prime Minister Rama. Even without prejudging his will to lead Tirana to early elections, and while fully understanding the urgency to find a political solution to the impasse for the capital, Rama must again understand that good things cannot be achieved with wrong and hasty means.
In conditions where the mayor cannot enter his office for reasons beyond his control, the prime minister should have either waited for Veliaj to resign from his post, which would have been a personal moral and political act by Veliaj, or he should have waited until the legal means available to the local elected official to protect his contract with the electorate were exhausted. In this way, he would at least have been coherent with his political literature of February, immediately after the mayor's arrest.
The second person who needs to breathe again after this decision of the Constitutional Court is the opposition leader. Berisha's contradictions and ambiguities in this process, the fruit of frustration from the past, lack of political courage, anxiety of expected defeat and the rush to get today's egg by sacrificing tomorrow's chicken, led the veteran Berisha to the arms of a naive mistake and an amateur action.
Berisha both praised his co-authorship in the dismissal of Veliaj, and agreed to enter on November 9, in an electoral process that would be unconstitutional. He also opposed the decree on the elections, and legitimized the elections with participation. Today, Berisha would certainly have reason to feel proud and say that he is a declared legitimist, if on the day of the decree of the elections for Tirana he had said: “We, the opposition, do not become part of a process that is poisoned from the start!” Instead, also because of the phobia of boycott, once used incorrectly, he became a party to failure, where he could have been a moral triumphant.
The third person who should see this decision of the Constitutional Court in the light of his eyes is the president of the republic. The talented doctor on his CV and the courageous former army general before entering the office of the head of state, signed a decree based on the advice and consultancy of his staff. In the only public appearance on Top Channel with Grida Duma to explain his decree, President Begaj said that he would defend his position at all costs. A position that turned him into a lightning rod for the anger of a broad coalition, from the noisy opposition to the mute majority, from the majority of independent lawyers to the megalomaniacs and mythomaniacs who claim to be more righteous than Solomon and more honest than Christ.
The president became the target of attacks from that part of politics that, more than the desire to win over the opponent, needs to find external alibis for losses and internal addresses to dismiss defeats. But even beyond this, no one, in all likelihood, including the isolated Veliaj, will mark an important side effect of the presidential decree: the increase in urgent circumstances that prompted the acceleration of the decision of the constitutional court. Which, on the contrary, could be postponed with the classic laziness of Albanian institutions until the "Turkish" calendars.
The rest is just a banal story repeated many times. The calls for the president's dismissal by the opposition are part of the same story of hysteria that the socialist majority directed against Ilir Meta, president, in 2019. Then the former president issued a decree that overturned his decree for the local elections of June of that year. Even then, without prejudice to his motive, Meta attempted to do the right political thing, but with the wrong legal means.
The eventual postponement of the elections at that time would ease the chaotic situation that the country was going through after the DP's mandates were burned, but this could not happen with the instruments that the president had in his hands. The president could only be a spectator in a course of events that he sought to take over their direction.
The socialist majority then collected signatures for the dismissal that never happened. As it was right to happen, in fact. The democrats' infatuation with the same typology of war when the result is easily known at the beginning of the time, is one of those acts that resemble the actions of someone who has had a little too much to drink and says to his tablemate in the village club: "Shall we go somewhere and do a double take? Maybe we look brave and they sing us brave songs!". Appropriate and serious in this time, both dramatic and comic, would be a completely different thing. All parties should calmly accept a simple fact: This time the system worked, which fortunately left everyone dissatisfied! And this is no small thing for an Albania drunk on abnormality. On the contrary!
Lini një Përgjigje