Violent protest against highway tolls near Rreshen, Albania. Photo: Malton Dibra/LSA

In a normal situation, the so-called “tax on the ‘Road of the Nation’” that links Albania to Kosovo would have been talked over through political channels, like political party forums, the media, civil society organizations and so on.

It is a sign of Albania’s abnormality that nothing like that has happened. Instead, the tax was debated on the spot, last Saturday, and the language used for communicating grievances was violence and arson.

The protesters who burned the toll booths where the tax was to be paid came from Kukes. This is a small town that had never caused the authorities trouble. There has never been a breakdown of law and order in Kukes – except for last Saturday. Therefore, it is hard to see the use of violence by the protesters as completely unjustified.

It is also possible, as the government claims, that the opposition helped the violent protest. However, the opposition cannot organize violence out of nothing. Television images from the protest showed scores of old people throwing stones at the police. The violence received widespread applause on social media. There was general welcome for putting the government “in its place” and widespread condemnation of the greed of a bunch of businessmen with political connections that are more and more known as “oligarchs”. The main oil importer in the country, Kastrati, faces calls for a boycott because it co-owns the road concession. Calls for arson attacks on such businesses are more and more frequent.

All this shows the situation is worrying.

The biggest problem that Albanians face today is that they do not expect anything can change through the ballot box. The opposition parties are as discredited as the government. The history of the “Road of the Nation” or “The Patriotic Highway”, terms coined to describe the geopolitical and nationalistic reasons for its construction, is telling.

Construction started in 2007 and Minister of Transport at the time faced charges for corruption worth hundreds of millions of euros. Lulzim Basha avoided justice through procedural glitches and now leads the main opposition Democratic Party. When the road was opened in 2010, the costs had already soared to more than one billion euros, a huge sum for a small poor country. In 2011, the centre-right government started the procedure to charge tolls for it. The new leftwing government that came to power in 2013 basically followed the same procedure and awarded a concessionary contract in 2016. The Minister of Transport who signed it was from the Socialist Movement for Integration, LSI. Both Basha’s Democrats and the LSI now are protesting against the toll and urging “civil disobedience”.

Albanians have learned the hard way that changing the government doesn’t bring real changes. Both the previous and current governments awarded concessionary agreements worth hundreds of millions of euros, despite criticism from both Albanians and international organizations like the IMF about their costs and risks.

The problem is that the government knows what people knows, that is no hope from a normal political process. The government is currently claiming that it was unaware of the “psychological troubles caused by the toll”, as Prime Minister Edi Rama called it.

This is difficult to believe. The government has plenty of statistics that tell it how poor the Kukes region is. It doesn’t need to see a violent protest to understand that. Instead, it seems to use a “hit and run” strategy, continuously testing the limits of what people can bear. There has been a long series of tax increases over the last few years in Albania. In the meantime the government has been unable to deliver any meaningful improvement. Although Rama is in his fifth year in government, no new road or other meaningful public utility has been built. People are asking what the government does with their taxes.

Yet, there are no effective checks on the power of the Prime Minister. Parliament doesn’t function as an independent body from the government, the opposition is weak and discredited while the justice system seems impotent to investigate those in power. When pressure on the justice system to act against corruption increases, only low-level officials, mostly from the opposition, end up accused.

Elections provide little in the way of alternatives. Political machineries that use coercion, blackmail, money and sometimes violence to accumulate votes are more important. Such political machineries have become more sophisticated during the last few elections, as the ideological appeal of the political parties decreases. However, such machineries need money to work and their needs rely on more and more taxes and ever-growing mismanagement of public funds. The current government has increased taxes and currently has plenty of money. However, any project it tries to implement, either in road construction or water utilities, has faced hurdles and costs that have been inflated. Just ten years ago, a million euros was enough in Albania to build a single kilometer of highway. Currently, 20 million euros are not enough.

This kind of politics creates huge imbalances and extreme inequality, which is reflected also in environmental degradation.

Although it is a heavy burden for the poor citizens of Kukes, the toll on the highway to Kosovo is expected to yield about 8 million euros per year. On the other hand, the government last year lost 60 million euros in tax revenues when the local oil refinery went bankrupt last December. The poor people of Kukes will have to pay a tax for six years to compensate the losses of just one tax evader.

Such a political system, sometimes called the “spoils system”, is not unique to Albania and exists in many countries. Concessionary agreements seem to have been used in the case of Albania to feed such a system.

A few months ago, the IMF urged the government of Albania to be more prudent regarding such agreements. “The government’s framework for selecting and prioritizing investment projects, and for assessing fiscal costs and risks, remains inadequate,” the IMF country representative, Jens Reinke, told BIRN last month.

“Until this framework can be substantially strengthened, it would be best not to sign any new large PPP contracts. Also, we recommend that the government tender all projects and not rely on unsolicited proposals,” he added.

What the IMF calls “costs and risks”, Albanians call “theft”. The government has been deaf to both. It has openly disregarded the advice and claimed that such concessionary agreements are “inspiring”. Only the violence on last Saturday protest brought the government to its senses. Rama still pretends to be a visionary but misunderstood leader who is carrying out unpopular “reforms”. However, after the violence he agreed to start talking to people.

Chaos is a real possibility in such a situation. There have been many instances over the last few months of desperate people using desperate means to communicate with government. In some cases, people climbed construction cranes threatening suicide if the authorities do not listen to their plight. Last December, dozens of unpaid oil workers started a 100km-long walk from their home in Fieri to Tirana, thinking that only such an extreme sacrifice will force the government to listen. Apparently, the toll protesters found a more effective way to be heard.

We should wonder how we got into a situation where politics doesn’t understand any other language except violence.