After a long season of promoting pies, jams, and stories from folkloric Albania, Rudina Xhunga seems to have found the next product to advertise: Edi Rama.
The Prime Minister, who has long carefully chosen the scene, the camera and the journalist in front of him, this time appears in the large format of “300 questions”. On paper it sounds like a confrontation. In practice, it remains to be seen whether they will really be questions, or whether they will resemble those former conversations where Nexhmije Hoxha was not confronted, but gently accompanied to tell her version of the story.
Because the problem is not the number. There could be 30, 300 or 3 thousand questions. The issue is whether they touch on the right things: power, corruption, SPAK, Sazani, political clientele, succession, the capture of institutions and the way Rama has built a system where responsibility disappears as soon as he approaches the prime minister’s door.
Rudina Xhunga is not a new name in journalism. Quite the opposite. So the question is even stronger: will she behave in front of Rama as a journalist, or as the host of a spectacle where the prime minister comes to explain himself, to laugh at his opponents, to relativize scandals and to come out in the end as always, intact?
The comparison with Nexhmije Hoxha is not about the person, but about the spirit. For that way of interviewing where the government is not questioned, but is allowed to narrate itself. Where journalism does not interrupt, does not force, does not turn to the facts, but paves the way for the official version with television courtesy.
In this sense, the “300 questions” could easily turn into 300 opportunities for Rama to do what he does best: talk at length, avoid the point, and leave the studio looking like a man who just answered everything, without actually answering anything.
In the end, Rama doesn’t need much new propaganda. He needs old packaging with familiar faces. And after promoting pies and jams across Albania, Rudina Xhunga seems to have moved on to the most important product of the season: promoting the prime minister.