Blog

Athens, February 20, 2017
Our Balkan neighborhood is not used to good news, but the effective uprising of the Romanian people, at the beginning of this month, against the government's attempt to grant a collective amnesty to political scandals with crimes of all kinds, is a pleasant surprise for former ministers and MPs in prison, while they are pending. Although in recent years the Romanian judiciary has sent final decisions in a large number of cases of political figures for money laundering, abuse of power and other forms of corruption, the new Romanian coalition government attempted to protect the country's new political nomenclature and closed, by a ministerial decree, passed overnight under the pretext of the need to decongest prisons, more than 2.000 criminal cases, mostly involving political figures. The “well done” to the hundreds of thousands of Romanian demonstrators, who demonstrated despite the harsh weather conditions, has a special value because, on the one hand, they demonstrated passionately for justice and not for collective economic interests, and on the other hand, they stopped protesting long after the decision was withdrawn, thus sending a stern message to the country’s political world about any future wrongdoing. This is a political earthquake in Bucharest, which caused smaller “political” seismic vibrations in the form of support, in the Prime Minister’s hometown, Timisoara, and in the capitals of neighboring Moldova and Bulgaria, Chisinau and Sofia. Above all, however, it is a moral lesson, the like of which has not been given to us by Bucharest or any other Balkan capital to date.
   

A similar "revolt of conscience" is currently taking place in Albania, led by the main opposition party. The protesters are primarily protesting the fact that Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has turned the country into a marijuana plantation, the production of which in Albania in 2016 was five times higher than in 2015, and Albania has now been "recognized" as the "Colombia of Europe." Rama is accused of seeking to emulate the Montenegrin former communist Milo Djukanovic, who has continuously dominated his country's political scene since 1991, either as president of the Republic or as prime minister, with the huge proceeds from drug sales, having so far evaded Italian and German justice, which have targeted him as a cigarette smuggler collaborating with the state-owned tobacco company and the Montenegrin State Port Authorities.

The pleasant thing is that Rama's completely arbitrary governance of the country is rejected by a large portion of the Albanian people, who, having become acquainted with European data through their immigration status and wishing for their country to become a state governed by the rule of law, are taking advantage of any existing opportunities to pursue the dream of a just society with different values ​​than those that prevailed under Hoxha.

Similar reactions had preceded two years ago in FYROM, when it was revealed by the official opposition that Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski had set up a mechanism to monitor the telephone conversations of 20.000 prominent citizens of the country in order to ensure the extension of his stay in power by all means. The popular uprising led to the fall of the Gruevski government and early elections took place after two long-term postponements, but their result did not allow the formation of a government. Immersed in chronic political chaos, arbitrariness and corruption scandals, FYROM seems to no longer enjoy strong transatlantic support and official voices are already being heard from the USA, which believe that the best solution in its case is the division of its territories among its neighboring states.
Small signs of healthy reactions to corrupt political practices have also been manifested in Bulgaria, and it is no coincidence that the special importance given to the election of the new president of the republic, who comes from the armed forces, not only does not come from the stigmatized political space, but had clashed with it.

The main difficulty in overthrowing the corrupt political establishment, from end to end throughout the Balkans, is the fact that the political elites in the post-communist political systems are not only corrupt and often collaborating with various criminal underworld groups, but are also blackmailable both by various powerful figures in Brussels and by powerful Western governments. In addition, Soros foundations and various notorious NGOs have corrupted large segments of local societies by directing political developments in our Balkan surroundings with dirty money.

The immediate future will show whether the surprises of Romania, Albania, and FYROM are signs of maturity or an optical illusion.
George E. Doudoumis