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When the President of the Republic performs Hajj

2026-05-26 20:51:00, Opinione Luan Rama

When the President of the Republic performs Hajj
The public appearance of the President of the Republic of Albania in the Hajj, within a structured religious ritual with a full religious charge, constitutes a constitutional provocation in the deepest sense of the word, as it appears as an open violation of the principle of secularism and the way of symbolic representation of the state by the Head of State.
In a constitutional republic, the President is not a private individual who stands parallel to his institutional function.
He is a figure who embodies the unity of the people and the unitarity of the state beyond political, social and religious differences.
Precisely for this reason, he does not represent only himself, but a common space where no citizen should feel excluded because of his beliefs.
The secularism of the state, sanctioned in the Constitution, is not a neutral declarative formula, but a structural principle that organizes the relationship between public power and religion. It requires not only non-interference of religion in the state, but also non-identification of the state with any religious form in the space of its representation. In this sense, Article 10 of the Constitution and its Article 86, which defines the President as the representative of the unity of the people, function as part of a single normative whole: guaranteeing the symbolic neutrality of the state.
The Hajj is not a culturally neutral event, but a structured religious ritual of Islam, one of its five pillars, where through standardized rites in Mecca, the devotion and equality of believers before God is expressed.
It is an act of high religious density, where form and meaning cannot be separated without emptying its very content.
The constitutional question arises precisely at this point: what happens when the figure of the Head of State representing the secular state not only appears, but also becomes the bearer of faith within such a symbolic religious space?
In modern constitutional law, especially in traditions that attach importance to state neutrality, it is not only the subjective purpose of the act that matters, but also its objective effect in the public space.
The president is not simply a biological individual, but an exposed institutional body, where every gesture, presence and appearance produces state meaning.
Here also arises constitutional provocation, which is not a closed legal category, but an analytical way to describe the moment when the Constitution is not respected.
Because the Constitution is not only a normative text; it is also a symbolic order. And this order requires that public power not produce religious identification in any visible form of representation. When this boundary becomes unclear, even without an express legal act of prohibition, then we do not simply have a debate of interpretation, but a slow shift in the meaning of neutrality itself.
In this sense, the problem is not the President's faith, nor his right to participate in a religious ritual as a citizen.
The problem is when this faith appears through the Head of State and begins to be read as a sign of the state. Because at that moment, the state becomes controversial in its symbolism. From this moment, the issue does not remain isolated.
If today this form of symbolic religious manifestation is normalized in the figure of the President of the Republic, then we are not dealing with a case, but we are creating a precedent. And in the logic of the constitutional state, precedent is not simply a repetition, but a transformation of the standard of the norm.
If this limit is relativized for a certain form of faith, then the path is opened for us to have similar symbolic manifestations in the future in relation to other forms of faith. Thus, a President may be perceived as lacking in representation if he does not appear symbolically close to a certain religious tradition, or he may find himself under pressure to produce balances of religious visibility for the sake of a neutrality misunderstood as symbolic symmetry.
In such a development, state neutrality loses its content. It ceases to be an exception to religious identification and begins to become its administration. The state no longer stands outside religious symbolism, but begins to manage it through its highest figure, the President of the Republic. And this is the most silent, but also the deepest and most damaging shift: from a secular state to a symbolically religious state.
In the end, the question is not whether the President can be a believer or participate in the Hajj. The question is what happens to the meaning of the institution of the President when the boundary between state representation and religious symbolism is violated in the public space.
Because a constitutional republic is not only endangered by the violation of its norms, but also by changing the way they are understood and implemented.
Under these conditions and after such a constitutional, state, ethical, civic and political provocation, what remains for the Assembly of the Republic of Albania to do is to immediately initiate the process of dismissing Haxhi Bajram Begaj from the office of President of the Republic.
Because the Assembly of the Republic of Albania has a constitutional obligation to protect the Constitution of the Republic of Albania, to protect secularism and the honor of the state.