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Why don't good people stay in Albanian politics?
2026-02-28 12:18:38 / IDE
This question is often phrased as a rhetorical question but also loaded with a large dose of disappointment, as if voluntary departure implied fragility, failure, or a lack of stability and ability.
"If only good people had been patient a little longer, had stayed a little longer; had learned to play the game, we wouldn't be witnessing the collapse of politics and leadership at this level." This is the reasoning I face every time I talk about voluntary resignation from government.
But this perspective misunderstands the problem. "Good people" didn't leave politics because they couldn't handle the pressure. They left because they understood what the established system silently rewarded and punished.
When I speak of "good people," I do not mean saints or superheroes, but dozens of individuals who have fallen away because they chose to be guided by principles rather than status, fame, or power. People who experienced genuine discomfort when asked to trade integrity for political expediency; people who, once they realized that the deep gap between public rhetoric and government intent could not be bridged, reacted.
In the governments of the Renaissance, without exception from the beginning to the end, integrity is praised rhetorically, but not institutionally protected. If you object, you are naive or, worse, conflicted; if you raise ethical concerns, you are told that "you still don't understand how things work." In them, competence is related to the ability to tolerate behavior and actions that are completely unacceptable. There, competence means learning to sit undisturbed at tables where decision-making is not guided by the public interest, but by personal positioning in relation to the leader; it means accepting that results matter little or nothing and survival is everything.
Those who mastered these "skills" for the sake of status and power survived. Those who rejected these skills, even publicly, were labeled as ungrateful or traitors to the political family.
Bertrand Russell reminds us that: "a man has lived a worthy life when he has seen the world beyond his personal interests", and the tragedy of the survivors in politics and government, (there are unfortunately still people dear to me there), is not that they know less and less about the meaning of a worthy life, but that the meaning of a worthy life concerns them less and less.
Well, leaving politics is not a renunciation, but an act of integrity. Not everyone is destined to survive in environments where moral flexibility is rewarded and valued over moral clarity.
How good that there are still among us models of people who refuse to survive in these environments, as a reminder or proof that this political environment must change.
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