When the citizen no longer leaves his place empty!

By Arian Galdini

Albania has not been damaged only by those who have governed badly.

It has also been damaged by the empty place the citizen has left in public life.

Not because he has not voted, not because he has not been angry, not because he has not spoken at home, in the street, on the screen, or alone with himself.

The wound is deeper, the citizen has often been present as discontent and absent as responsibility.

Present when he is counted.

Absent when he is needed to build.

Present when he complains.

Absent when the country asks for someone who will not walk away after the words are spoken.

This absence has left the Republic incomplete.

The old order has always known this.

That is why it has wanted the citizen useful, but not free.

It has wanted him as a voter, not as a person who creates representation.

It has wanted him as a number, not as a force.

It has wanted him as a crowd, not as conscience.

It has wanted him summoned on the right day and forgotten the day after.

This is how a country is built where people vote, yet do not feel represented.

Where much is said about democracy, but the citizen is taught to see politics as something that happens elsewhere, by others, for interests that rarely reach his life.

A society is not ruined only when it is ruled badly.

It is also ruined when decent people withdraw.

When the honest person says it is not worth it.

When the wounded become spectators.

When angry people lock their anger inside a comment and leave the next day just like yesterday.

Albania does not change by anger alone.

Anger can break the silence.

It can show the wound.

It can ignite a moment.

But a country is not built by a moment.

It is built by the person who returns.

By the word kept after the applause.

By the hand that does not pull away when the work loses its first shine.

Here begins the difference between the citizen who watches and the citizen who carries.

The one who watches judges from afar.

The one who carries takes up his share.

The one who watches waits for the crowd to give him courage.

The one who carries no longer postpones his conscience until it becomes comfortable.

The one who watches speaks of the country as if it were a foreign body.

The one who carries understands that Albania is not only what is done to him, it is also what he agrees to do for it.

The citizen is not born politically only when he votes.

The vote is a moment.

Responsibility is a road.

A person who goes only to the ballot box, but is absent from public life, has a formal right, but not a full presence.

He has been counted, but he has not weighed.

He has taken part in the procedure, but not in the fate of the country.

The Republic is not sustained only by the hand that casts the ballot.

It is sustained by the person who does not abandon his place between two elections.

That is why every reform, every threshold, every list, every agreement, and every formula remains incomplete if the citizen is treated as the regulated spectator of an old game.

A system that asks only for his vote, while making participation difficult, does not free the Republic.

It merely administers its silence.

The old order is not afraid only of new parties.

It is afraid of the citizen who is no longer absent.

Of the person who no longer waits for an invitation to think.

Of the one who no longer leaves Albania always in someone else’s hands.

Of the one who does not allow fatigue to become his second homeland.

This is the political birth Albania needs to recover.

Not as another noise, not as one more flag in a tired market of names, not as an ambition that seeks only a seat, but as the citizen’s return to the place where responsibility can no longer be delegated.

LRE Rinisja does not ask for attention for itself.

It is an invitation to this return, from distance to presence, from comment to participation, from fatigue to responsibility.

Where this happens, even a small beginning is no longer small.

It is a sign that the country can still bring forth people who do not surrender their trust to fatigue.

Albania will not be reborn on the day when citizens become angrier.

It will be reborn on the day when the citizen is no longer absent from the place where the country needs him to stand.

That is where the Republic begins.

Arian Galdini