Spiropali and Salianji: When desire becomes "breaking news"

2026-04-19 09:17:00, Opinione Hysni Gurra

Elisa Spiropali seems to be copying Ervin Salianji. She has started meetings in her electoral area with the Socialists, which is being interpreted as a challenge to Edi Rama.

Such a thing has been happening in the DP for some time with Ervin Salianji. A character with whom the DP has been very generous, both in giving positions and in declaring him a hero after a sentence and imprisonment for banal reasons, very difficult to martyr or make a political hero. While the criminal decision was a fabrication and staging of an audiotap. But what does it matter? Even if Ervin had been right, only two people benefited from that videotaping in the Democratic Party: the first was Lulzim Basha, the second — even more beneficial than Luli — was Ervin.

This was the only political work that made him known to his party's supporters, but also beyond, because until then he was known as a friend of Sadri Abazi.

Elisa Spiropali, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar journey to Ervin. With the denunciations when she was in opposition, those trips to the Bulqiza mine (who remembers them), the hunger strike and then the unprecedented praise for Rama.
While Ervin has clearly undertaken a political incursion that only leads him to a position like that of Dash Sula, Elisa remains very unclear about where this incursion might lead her.

However, both are worth commenting on to understand why the power of strong political leaders, whether in the SP or the DP, has remained unchallenged in recent decades. But also to highlight a truth, what a ridiculous country we are, where a desire, "I want to be mayor", becomes news in all the media.

When you hear Salianj, who says he loves the Democratic Party — the right, that is — you are surprised. He has zero right-wing political theses. Of course, he does not fulfill them in his personal life, even formally.

For example, he attacks the party leadership, as if they don't attack businessmen, when the base of that party should be businessmen. Salianji speaks as if he is looking for Arlind Qori's party. He doesn't have a thesis, for example, about what he thinks about property. Or he doesn't say, for example, what his political idea is that would make the DP a more right-wing party than it is. For example, the political thesis is that: Berisha has made the DP a member of the EPP; I will take it out, I will take it further to the right, I will make it a member of the group of parties like that of Le Pen, Meloni or the AfD. Or he hasn't come out, for example, to attack the DP leadership for not dealing enough with the family, the nation — that is, some basic ideological things of this party — to say that they haven't done well and I will do better. His only political rhetoric is: "I want to be mayor someday" — a desire that anyone can have, but Irfan has no friends, no close friends on national TV, and no one makes his wish a breaking news story.

We come to Elisa Spiropali.

She is a little more restrained than Salianji in rhetoric, but not in desire. She started out as anger because Skanderbeg removed her from the ministry and began to articulate herself lamely in a terrain full of mines, such as the current Socialist Party.

Just as Ervini has no political theses for the right, Elisa has none for the left. For example, Elisa does not dare to say that our party, under Rama's leadership, has become a fiefdom of the oligarchy and has forgotten the worker, the peasant, the miner, the poor.

She dares not say that our party, by moving from its ideological axis, has caused colossal damage to Albania in the last decade. The only thing to be commended about Elisa is that she dared not to vote once in parliament according to Rama's directive for Belinda Balluku.

But even this, so far, remains within the framework of a quarrel or jealousy between women and not an act of political/ideological distancing. So far, she tries to write “drafts”, which, to be fair, she does better than Salianji — but that's it.

Having said all this, the party power of the main leaders of the major parties seems to be going to continue for a long time, since this people produces so much. One leader in 30–40 years; here, the SP was lucky to produce two in 35 years, also because it is an older party — but that's it.