‘I’m ashamed to have Albanians’, was the most painful feeling while listening to the Albanian Prime Minister in a live press conference at noon with European journalists who have come in numbers to cover the protests in Albania. Thank goodness the Prime Minister did not speak as an Albanian but as autocrats who have no nationality.
From Putin to Vučić to Erdogan and Aliev, all of these anti-democratic leaders have a common language with the free media: ridicule and personal attacks to derail the press conference and not provide any answers.
‘Your brain is completely blocked by lies and it’s no wonder you’re Romanian’, Edi Rama addressed her in the ugliest way a correspondent from Romania could exist. Meanwhile, her sister from another European country widened her eyes in surprise but perhaps also in fear when Rama addressed her like an obsessed person with the rambling words ‘doesn’t what I’m telling you seem very sexy’? All the foreign female journalists started looking at each other in shock, did the Albanian Prime Minister really speak like that?
Meanwhile, Rama continued with his blunders with a tone, look and growl that made the date and the cameramen laugh. ‘My lady, there is no project in Zvërnec, there is only a project idea, not a project’, Rama continued this surrealistic monologue for half an hour. Surreal because at the same time he told foreign journalists that he had seen the sketches made by the best architects for the tourist complex in Zvërnec and was amazed.
But an Austrian journalist, left perplexed by these incredible contradictions of Rama, makes signs with her hands and eyes from the chair where she was sitting, which means, there is a project in Zvërnec! It would be better not to have asked that question because it gave Rama the opportunity to resume a barrage of insults of the type ‘oh my God, how is it possible that you don’t understand anything’.
He went so far as to give the example of a couple ‘who are about to get married and have a plan to buy a house, but until they have bought it, it is not called a plan’!
And the camera captures the entire room with foreign journalists, mouths open and faces: let’s all scream together from laughter or crying.
Finally, the world understood today what Albanians are suffering with this character who at this moment has nothing left to save him, not only politically…
A serious journalistic question, however, begs to be asked: why were Albanian journalists not allowed to participate in the press conference? Not even Donald Trump, whom Rama is imitating with his insults to the press, has dared to separate foreign journalists from local ones in the White House.
A good student always tends to surpass the professor.