Fatos Lubonja: Why I broke up with my friend Edi Rama

2024-11-01 10:20:00, Politikë CNA

The largest French weekly, with a center-left tendency, "Le Nouvel Obs", published a very long article about what it calls the Albanian mafia.

In this article, she also quoted Fatos Lubonjë, whose long interview she then published on the "online" page of "Le Nouvel Obs". He is asked in the interview, among other things, about the broken friendship with Edi Rama.

According to him, he broke up with Rama after the latter entered politics.

interview

You yourself know Prime Minister Edi Rama well, who was one of your close friends and a member of your literary magazine "Perpjekja", founded in Tirana in 1994, three years after you got out of prison.

Fatos Lubonja: It is true. At that time, he had returned from Paris, where he had studied plastic arts. He had a saying: "Intellectuals seek truth, while politicians seek votes." I was friends with him when he sought the truth.

But when he became a politician, he betrayed all his ideas. He, who became famous in 2003 with an extensive artistic project that included the bright color repainting of all the facades of the center of Tirana when he was mayor, is now the founder of the destruction of all our historical monuments, which he replaces with ugly buildings and phallic towers, the construction of which serves to launder drug money.

But all this, Giorgia Meloni, and before her Matteo Renzi, Italian prime minister from 2014 to 2016, or Donald Trump, president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, who is seeking a new term in the White House, his friends young people, they don't see them.

He has fabricated an iconic character, a bit of an artist, a bit of everything, that pretends to be progressive, almost "woke" at times, in order to please and why not, to entertain Westerners.

This is ironic, because at the same time organized crime is thriving and more than 700,000 of the 2.8 million Albanians have fled the country to immigrate en masse to Western and Northern Europe. It reminds me of Guy Debord's prophecy: "If in a system, the illusion with its spectacular forms reaches the point where it prevails over reality, it shows that the social order is in crisis of legitimacy."