Campaign suspends the planting of kiosks
Sources within the Tirana Municipality say that an order issued in recent days has brought all construction permits to a halt, especially the licensing of kiosks.
The same sources confirm, though unofficially, that the reason is not simply the brutal uglification inflicted on the capital, and especially its green spaces, by kiosks now labeled “Sali Kelmendi’s handiwork,” but rather a “giving in” to press pressure. The latter, with its sustained barrage focused on their existence, gave the leaders of the Democratic campaign the idea that kiosks are the “Achilles’ heel” on which opponents’ propaganda could base its criticism. To be fair, unlike many other issues—such as current unemployment, rising crime, the low quantitative and qualitative levels of promised investment, corrupt privatization, and so on—whose real scale and condition have often escaped scrutiny because of the lack of figures, the “nightmarish” reality of the kiosks cannot be concealed by a lack of transparency. The ruling party’s unspoken wish to do so is made even more difficult by the fact that, until recently, kiosks were treated in propaganda aimed at presenting the DP as Western-oriented in the eyes of disappointed voters as one of the most effective indicators of the success of the “free initiative” policy; figures running into the thousands were even published. Of course, nobody took on the mad adventure of counting them, while remaining convinced that the published figures, although they did not represent the real number, would still have been alarming even if, in the best-case scenario, they matched the permits officially issued. This was not so much because of the disorderly, invading sprawl, destructive of the little good Tirana was able to inherit from its primitive infrastructure, as because urban-planning laws—among the few areas of authority enjoyed by local government in a country where “free initiative” genuinely reigns—began to be spoken of as a form of naivety: if enforced, they would leave people with nothing at all. Therefore, the verbal decision attempting somewhat to repair the tarnished image of a failure that keeps repeating itself, despite the practical value it brings to the DP’s campaign, cannot at the same time erase the negative value of the fait accompli—even if it were turned into a trial or a punishment of Kosovo, or even if it were fully carried out by taking the seal out of the hands of the current administration of the Tirana Municipality. The truth is that, with their brutal assault exposing the incompetence of Tirana’s administrators, the kiosks not only left no room to plant other rivals (even if the campaign had not stopped this), but also extinguished the long chain of paradoxes in our governing mentality, including urban planning and civilization in their political terminology (and not merely urban-planning and economic terminology, as everywhere else in the world), even with an ordinal number assigned. Even if this comes as a bitter blow to the DP’s election campaign, the blame lies neither with the customers-voters nor with the kiosk owners, but with those who now suffer the boomerang effect of the kiosks they themselves once politicized.
With their brutal assault exposing the Municipality’s incompetence, the kiosks left no more free land for other rivals.