FLASH
Shkruar nga Roland Lami
Until the day comes when an Albanian politician steps up to the podium and says: "I lost. Not because they stole from me, but because I didn't convince the people," then we can say that we have finally entered the era of responsibility.
New York City has elected its first Muslim mayor. Democrat Zohran Mamdani won the race against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. In a gesture that honors the very spirit of democracy, Sliwa congratulated his opponent on his victory and accepted defeat without hesitation.
In Albanian politics, the word “congratulations” has the unfortunate fate of being misused or forgotten. It only comes out of the mouth when the microphone is off and the cameras are away. In public, the loser does not congratulate, he denounces. The winner does not thank, he triumphs. It is a familiar choreography, where everything seems democratic, but nothing is at least sporting.
In theory, democracy is a regulated game of competition, a field where losing is as legitimate as winning. In the practice of Albanian politics, it is a mythology of political honor, where losing is not a result, but a shame. Max Weber would call it a lack of “ethics of responsibility”; we simply call it a lack of dignity in accepting reality.
Here, each political party is like a team that enters the match with the conviction that the referee is bought. And when the game is over, the result is always wrong. No defeat is accepted, no victory is clean. Democracy turns into a game that never ends, because no one accepts the final whistle.
This is not simply political culture, it is collective psychology. We have not built the concept of a legitimate opponent, we have inherited the figure of the enemy. Therefore, congratulating on victory is not a civic act, but ideological blasphemy. The loser who says “congratulations” risks being expelled as a traitor from his own camp. Thus, it is better to accuse than to admit; it is better to declare a “conspiracy” than to admit defeat.
In this political theater, responsibility is like a hot ball that no one will hold. Did we lose? The blame lies with the counting, the government, the weather, the diaspora, the CEC algorithm. No one asks themselves if maybe, just maybe, people were not convinced. Because admitting guilt is a moral luxury that Albanian politics cannot afford. It lives by the unspoken principle: “It is always someone else who is to blame.”
In this sense, congratulating one's opponent is the highest proof of democratic citizenship and, precisely for this reason, remains the rarest gesture. It requires maturity, not rhetoric; character, not strategy. And this is a luxury that our politics does not recognize, because it still feeds on the myth of "eternal victory."
Until the day comes when an Albanian politician steps up to the podium and says: "I lost. Not because they stole from me, but because I didn't convince the people," then we can say that we have finally entered the era of responsibility.
Until then, we will continue to see losers declared winners and winners behaving like victims of a democracy of big words and small gestures, where congratulation is harder than victory itself.
Lini një Përgjigje