Citizens, we have become counters for complaints of the kind of nonsense that is repeated to us every day, from this tabor and from that tabor. A little work and knowledge would have done you no harm. That you have crushed us so much, that maybe the day of protests for our Zvrnecats will not be far away
How much money was wasted for these elections!
The good news is that the campaign ended, or will end tomorrow at 7:00, leaving us with the bitter taste that we continue to waste precious time to progress even a little. Elections ultimately do not do this.
What did we learn from this campaign?
Absolutely nothing new. We heard word for word, repetition in one form or another, we heard endless promises about how we will spend the available money to increase the salaries of the public sector by 30, 50 or as much as they want; that it will continue with this social scheme, or that other, and again, no one gave any concrete proposal on how to put the pension, social, and even health systems into operation, despite the fact that last week some decision was made regarding health insurance. And those insurances that we have had on paper since 2017, who knows what time. Very depressing.
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Now that there will no longer be such an intense campaign, I believe that the absolute winners in terms of creativity and arguments will be the PSD candidates who ran the entire campaign on social networks, hitting the opposition hard until yesterday, and probably tomorrow.
The PSD came out with very few candidates with the clear aim of crossing the threshold, a goal which I honestly do not believe it will achieve, because it lacks the scope and handicap of being a faction of the VV, with which the party entered politics. But, the arguments presented in the commercials are hardly undeniable. Because the opposition, which bears the main responsibility for why we entered the elections after only four or five months, has neither power, nor ideas, nor trust nor credibility.
The two major opposition parties are unable to get out of the shell they live in – one admits its weakness with the lack of leaders who are now facing trial in The Hague, while the other tries to keep its head above water by turning to the figure of Rugova, who was a leader in completely different times and circumstances and who strongly relied on the political opinion of Fehmi Agan.
Kosovo needs an opposition. But it is clear that it does not rely on the personal interests of certain political figures, but that it has a vision for forcing the government to give up ideas and actions that do not bring any good to society in general. No lies, no dry promises, no deception.
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From the way the leaders of the parties are behaving and how they are communicating with the public in the most frequent interviews in the electronic mediums, the election results are almost already being seen – which, it seems, will not change much from last time.
This means that even if the VV lost its seat in the Assembly, it cannot lose so much that the opposition, if it were to unite, gather the votes of the non-majority, non-Serb communities, and create the omnibus government without the Serbian List.
And after Banjska – I don’t know which Albanian party would connect with Vucic’s exponents to gain power. This has been possible in the past and has happened several times, and one of the reasons why the opposition has lost ground at the level of general elections so much in the past six or seven years is precisely this fact.
If such a scenario were to hypothetically happen, it would be a very big surprise, and not at all pleasant, I believe.
Tomorrow evening, if things go as they did last time with the CEC, we will have the preliminary results and we will probably have to wait a couple of weeks for the final ones. That’s when the third season of the “elections” series will start, which started last February.
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In the meantime, returning to normal life, or rather abnormal life, because only elections are normal for us, there were two things that I singled out to comment on.
The first was a protest organized by an NGO two days ago in front of the Embassy of Albania regarding the project in Zvërnec.
I don’t know how many of the protesters are citizens of Albania, but if they are not, I honestly don’t know what they were looking for there to protest about something that is happening hundreds of kilometers away from Kosovo, in the territory of the state of Albania, which also has the right to a sovereign decision regarding the project or not (we in Kosovo have almost no reason to protest about our troubles).
Solidarity with the protesters in Tirana after the argument. Ani.
But when I think about it longer, it seems the same as if we, in case we were going to protest for, to take the tax that Rama wants to impose in Pristina, to expect someone in Tirana to go to the Embassy of Kosovo and protest about it.
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Since it was thrown into public debate “Completing the amendment of regulation 01. No. 110-2782 on 02.12.2011 for Tariffs, Charges and Fines in the Municipality of Pristina”, so far we have heard and read many reactions on social networks – but we have not seen any warning protest for an action that is even discriminatory.
While the Law defines Pristina as the capital, and Rama himself calls himself the mayor of the Capital, Pristina cannot be a city only for those who live here, regardless of which generation we belong to – after all, most of the residents of Pristina, for generations, have their roots outside of Pristina.
While the capital is also an administrative center where people from all over Kosovo are employed, regardless of whether they live in Pristina or not, imposing an entry tax in the city, without any discussion, is discriminatory. Moreover, it could cause a backlash from other municipalities in Kosovo, which would unnecessarily get us into trouble.
The proposal, what it is, foresees the tax in the amount of 10 euros per day. For someone who comes, for example, to work every day from Drenas, they are a minimum of 200 euros per month, I believe it is absolutely unaffordable.
It would make a lot of sense to apply such a tax to Prishtina residents and car traffic in the center, where congestion is greater, but Prishtina does not meet the basic conditions for such a thing – urban traffic is insufficiently developed and there are no mechanisms, as Singapore has, to limit the number of cars owned – we have quite a few families who have more than one car per household.
The reasoning that the approval of this regulation is being done because the government is keeping the EBRD money blocked, and that for this reason the outer ring of Pristina cannot be built (this ring work has been talked about for ten years), while Pristina receives an additional 20 million from the budget of Kosovo just because it is the capital and loses 45 million euros through enforcement procedures – is a bad spin.
And even worse is when in a FB status, Rama writes that the rates are scaled, that is, they are determined according to the vehicle, even though the draft regulation foresees a single rate for cars – 10 euros per day.
And since Prishtina, like Kosovo, has many problems that need to be addressed, there is no dilemma.
And that instead of work, all we hear is “the government is blocking” or “we have inherited 20 years of destruction” and this has no dilemma.
Citizens, we have become counters for complaints of the kind of nonsense that is repeated to us every day, from this tabor and from that tabor. A little work and knowledge would have done you no harm.
That you have crushed us so much, that maybe the day of protests for our Zvrnecats will not be far away.
