When power chooses violence

2026-09-02 18:32:24 / EDITORIAL NGA RED VARAKU
When power chooses violence

Faced with a protest, every government essentially has three options: either negotiate, ignore, or suppress it by force.

Of these three options left to him, Edi Rama chose the third, repression and violent suppression of the protest. This is due to the failure and powerlessness to buy it, blackmail it, divide it and undo it as he has done with all the citizen protests so far. 

So after 94 days, we have entered a new phase, which is revealing to us the nightmare and great fear that this government has from the spirit that protests are creating. 

This is because a government that feels secure in its legitimacy is not afraid of its citizens. On the contrary, it listens to them, negotiates with them, and responds to them politically. When the government chooses force as the first or final response to citizen discontent, then the problem is no longer protest.

The problem becomes power itself.

From this moment on, Edi Rama can no longer be presented as the solution to the crisis the country is going through. By choosing violence and repression, he risks becoming Albania's biggest political problem.

Because, when a prime minister, in order to maintain his power and his chair, is willing to escalate the clash with the citizens, he is putting the country on very dangerous ground and returning it to a time whose memories are still fresh.

Albania cannot become a minefield because of one man's personal political troubles. Power is not anyone's personal property and the State Police is not an instrument to resolve the political crisis.

Only from this moment on, the responsibility no longer falls solely on Edi Rama. Now, the responsibility also belongs to the Constitutional Institutions.

It is up to Parliament to block the madness of a person who thinks he can take the will of the citizens hostage. It is up to the Socialist Party and its parliamentary group to understand that loyalty to a leader cannot be more important than responsibility to the country. It is up to the President of the Republic to exercise his institutional role in protecting constitutional stability.

It is up to the Constitutional Court to be the guarantor of constitutional order and fundamental freedoms. And above all, it is up to the State Police to remember that it is the police of the Republic of Albania and not the personal police of a prime minister or a political party.

No government should be allowed to create an irreversible conflict with society, just to prolong its political life. Because when the government begins to see every citizen who protests as an enemy, then it has lost the ability to govern.

From this moment on, the question is no longer what the protest will do. The question is whether Albanian institutions will allow a single man to lead the country towards destabilization, just to preserve his power?

Because silence, at a moment like this, is not neutrality. It is complicity and co-responsibility.

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