When hearing Is controlled, the vote comes too late!

By Kristina Nano

Chair of LRE Rinisja

Democracy does not die only when the citizen is robbed of the vote.

It can die earlier, more quietly, more orderly, when the ballot remains in the box, the date remains on the calendar, the institutions remain standing, but before the citizen chooses, someone has already decided which voices will be allowed to reach him.

Political freedom does not begin at the ballot box.

It begins with hearing.

A citizen who hears only the alternatives permitted to become visible does not enter the vote freely.

He may have the formal right to choose, but his choice has already been narrowed before it begins.

His vote is counted, but his horizon has been limited.

He is not judging among free possibilities. He is judging among the possibilities left in front of him.

This is one of the most dangerous illnesses of formal democracies, they can preserve the process and lose the source.

They may have elections, campaigns, television studios, polls, reports, and declarations of stability, and still have a political life in which the birth of the new must first pass through invisible filters.

The democratic West should look at this danger with greater care.

Stability matters.

Institutions matter.

Elections held on time matter.

But none of them is enough if the citizen has not had a real chance to hear even what the old order would rather keep unheard.

A country may look calm from the outside and, at the same time, have closed within itself the space where new representation can be born.

Albania is proof of this wound.

Here, there is no shortage of words against power. There is no shortage of noise.

Nor is there any shortage of faces presented as new.

What is often missing is the free field in which every honest alternative can reach the citizen without depending on media, money, patronage, polls, the administration, or the silent permission of those who have learned to guard the entrance.

When some voices are quickly brought into the light and others are kept from being heard in public, the problem does not belong only to those left outside.

It belongs to the citizen.

He loses a possibility of judgment.

He loses a road to representation.

He loses part of his freedom before he ever casts the vote.

LRE Rinisja is not asking for a gift.

It is not asking to be handed airtime, a poll, or a political privilege.

It asks only for what a true democracy must protect without negotiation, the citizen’s right to hear even a voice that has not been produced, permitted, amplified, or accepted by the old order.

Because democracy is not only the right to choose among the voices that are allowed to reach the voter.

It is the right to hear, before the ballot box, even the voices that power would prefer never to become a choice.

When hearing is controlled, the vote comes too late.

Freedom must arrive earlier.

Kristina Nano

Chair of LRE Rinisja