New Albania, on a Politician’s Clock

By Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

There is a kind of political idea that arrives exactly on schedule, and the schedule is never the country’s. It is the author’s. Elisa Spiropali calls hers New Albania, and the timing tells you almost everything the text tries to obscure.

Read on its own, the manifesto she published in June is hard to fault. The state should be larger than the men who run it. Institutions should outlast the people who staff them. An opposition is not an accident to be managed but a faculty a democracy needs in order to correct itself. A free press should not have to ask permission before it asks a question. These are good sentences, and a country that lived them would be better for it. The difficulty was never the sentences. The difficulty is the clock.

Spiropali did not arrive at these convictions while she was climbing. As recently as 2019 she was the prime minister’s most devoted lieutenant, the woman who could compare Edi Rama to Skanderbeg without apparent strain. She ran Parliament. She took the Foreign Ministry. None of New Albania troubled her then. It surfaced only after February, when the reshuffle removed her from that ministry, and within weeks she had become the most audible dissident in her own party, absent from a vote on a colleague’s immunity, trading sharp words with the leader she had served. You do not have to impute a motive to a conversion this precise. The calendar imputes it for you. The limits of power became visible to her in the same season power stopped expanding for her.

What is striking, once you stop reading New Albania as philosophy and start reading it as positioning, is how little fixed content it carries. In February, as foreign minister, she worked Washington with evident comfort, sitting with the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with three United States senators, with the State Department, and with the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. In June she staged her renewal message from the Bundestag, beside Germany’s rapporteur for Albania. A politician who courts Heritage in winter and a center right German parliamentarian in summer is not enlisting in anyone’s culture war. She is not the European left’s answer to Trump’s America, and she is not the American right’s friend in the Balkans either. She is available to be read as both, in different rooms, which is the point. The one constant across the manifesto and the meetings is not an idea. It is a beneficiary.

Then there is the protest, and her instruction to the rest of us about it. Listen to the protesters, she says. Very well. Let us listen to what they are actually asking. The demands are not a mood. They are a list. Among them are the repeal of the strategic investment framework and the legal changes governing protected areas. Those are not symbolic demands. They would materially alter the conditions under which projects such as Sazan are now being pursued.

So “listen to the protesters” is not a sentiment. It is a policy, and it has a price tag. A country that unmakes its investment framework on the tempo of a nightly square is not reforming itself. It is foreclosing on itself. A former foreign minister understands this more exactly than the crowd does, which is precisely what makes her embrace of the demand, by proxy, from a careful step back, while she declines to stand in the square herself, the most revealing thing she has done. She wants the energy of the protest without owning its most expensive sentence, support without liability.

Then there is Berlin. She chose to send her transformation message from the German parliament, in the middle of the unrest at home, standing beside Peter Beyer, the legislator whose parliamentary brief is Albania. Parliamentary diplomacy runs on symbols as much as statements, and experienced legislators know a photograph travels further than a meeting note. Beyer is no innocent in this one. To receive a sacked minister turned rebel at the height of protests against her own government, and let the picture circulate, is to lend her a measure of legitimacy. Both of them understood it.

What it is not is a commitment. A signal of sympathy is not a transfer of anything. What Berlin is actually prepared to do for Elisa Spiropali is not contained in that image. The picture says she has friends in a consequential place. It does not say what those friends will spend, or whether they will still be in the room when spending is asked of them.

And here a sober word is owed, because it has become too easy to discuss this country as if it were a venue. Albania is a member of the Atlantic alliance and a candidate negotiating its entry into the European Union. It has an elected government, whatever one makes of it, and a citizenry entirely able to judge that government for itself. It is not a laboratory, and its politics are not an experiment to be supervised by friendlier hands abroad. The condescension worth refusing is not only the kind that arrives from outside. It is also the kind an Albanian politician imports when she treats a parliament in Berlin or a dinner in Washington as a source of standing she could not assemble at home. An ally is owed the dignity of being addressed as a principal. That dignity is rarely stripped from Albania by its partners. It is more often bargained away by Albanians who would sooner borrow a foreign endorsement than win a domestic argument.

New Albania may even be a good name for something the country genuinely needs. The state is too often smaller than the men inside it, and Spiropali is not wrong to say so. But a renewal that appears exactly when its author requires one, that leans one way in Washington and another in Berlin, and that asks the state to heed the voices now occupying the square on the single question where heeding them costs the most, is not yet a program. It is a candidacy, not a conscience.

Asked directly about the protests, the German foreign ministry’s spokesman called them a citizens’ right and an internal Albanian matter, and added nothing further. The sentence was short, and it did a great deal of work. It refused the part that several actors here keep trying to write for Germany. It ended the speculation of sponsorship before it could set. And it reminded the rapporteur and his colleagues, quietly and from above, who speaks for the German state. Spiropali is left holding the photograph. Berlin has put it back in its frame.

Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and analyst with a background in national-security studies and nearly three decades of experience with international organisations dealing with political and security affairs.