FLASH
Shkruar nga Roland Lami
Every absent vote is one less brick in the foundations of the Republic, and every silence is a hand raised to leave the country in the hands of a few people who never sleep, because their only dream is power.
On November 9, 2025, five municipalities, Vlora, Berat, Cerriku, Mati and Tepelena, held partial local elections. In official documents, the process took place normally. In reality, it took place under the effects of a deep political sleep that included the opposition, new parties, and even the majority itself.
Rational theory helps us to read this apathy: people vote when they feel they have something to gain or lose, but when they know the result in advance, voting loses its meaning. And so it happened: the opposition did not go because it knew it would not win, its voters did not go because they knew that their vote would not change anything. Meanwhile, the “new” opposition parties that were supposed to be a hope for energy and a hunger for electoral expansion turned out to be pale copies of the old ones, having chosen to sleep with their voters.
The same thing happened in the other political camp. Confident of their victory, many of the socialists did not vote at all. According to the terrorist, when the result is predetermined, even the winner sees the ballot box as a formality. Certain victory is numbing; it feeds the dangerous complacency that resembles the arrogance of long-standing power. And so, even when the SP wins, it wins with fewer citizens. Legitimacy decreases, while indifference increases.
On the other hand, authors of the theory of representation would say that here we have a democracy with partial representation: representatives elected by a few voters, who govern on behalf of many who have not spoken at all. A system that functions technically, but that is spiritually empty. A passivity that does not arise from ignorance, but from the conviction that the ballot box is no longer the place where change is made, but where routine is sealed and perhaps this is our common drama in the days to come.
At the end of the day, the by-elections were neither to elect mayors nor to measure political forces. They were a reflection of a country that knows the result before it votes. A country where democracy does not die from violence, but from drowsiness. We are entering a phase where democracies are not overthrown by force, but by non-participation.
Every absent vote is one less brick in the foundations of the Republic, and every silence is a hand raised to leave the country in the hands of a few people who never sleep, because their only dream is power.
If this pace continues, 2027 and 2029 will not be election years, but years of predetermined security. The risk is not that the Socialist Party will lose, but that it will win without votes, not that the opposition will disappear, but that it will rejoice in second place. And when the government sleeps on complacency, while the opposition sleeps, democracy does not fall, it simply expands the darkness around it.
Lini një Përgjigje