Let the protest choose its own leader!

The presentation of Dritan Goxhaj as a representative of the protest at Monday’s rally has triggered a wave of political reactions against him.

Most of them focus on speculation about his role in the KLA, his publicly expressed pro-Hezbollah views from several months ago, and the earlier controversy over his attempt to block Albcontrol in 2021.

The reaction has come almost entirely from the government side.

It starts with Prime Minister Edi Rama, who now seems relieved to have found a person through whom he can illustrate claims of Iranian influence. It continues with actual KLA commanders, who naturally reject the idea that Goxhaj should share in their wartime record because his father was part of the KLA’s political staff.

But this effort to police the protest is going too far.

The government is behaving as if it has been asked to vet the protest’s leader: pro-European, pro-American, not sympathetic to Iran or Hezbollah, not wanted by The Hague, not non grata in the United States, Europe or Britain, not prone to inventing KLA credentials, and preferably well behaved at work.

That is not the government’s job.

That is the protest’s job.

The protesters in the square have accepted Dritan Goxhaj as a representative. After this barrage of attacks, they seem even more willing to treat him as a leader.

In a way, the government has forced that status on him.

In a democracy, the government does not choose its opponent.

It defeats its opponent.

The government has no reason to draw up the ideal profile of a protest leader, as if Albania cannot tolerate an opponent unless he has passed every Western political, legal and moral filter in advance.

That is how unfree societies think.

In a free Albania, the opposition chooses its own leaders. A protest chooses its own representatives and its own reasons for protesting. The government’s job is to govern the country and defeat its opponents in elections.

It is not worth trying to defeat them through propaganda, even when the criticism is right.

I understand why Bardhyl Mahmuti is irritated. He was a senior political figure in the KLA and the first person to establish contact between the KLA and the United States in 1998. So naturally, he reacts when Dritan Goxhaj says he was the KLA’s “coordinator” with the United States in Tirana during the war.

Anyone who knows even a little about the history of the 1999 war will smile at that.

Most likely, it was one of those white lies he needed after the war to start working in Kosovo. A childish embellishment, not a matter of national security.

But even if it were true, it would not stop him from becoming a protest leader.

At that protest, even someone born in 1999 could become a leader.

The point is simple: those of us who disagree with the protest should not be helping it choose the leader we would prefer it to have.

The protest has its own face, its own strength, its own objectives and its own leaders.

Like any people, it deserves the leadership it has — as long as it chooses that leadership itself.

It does not need advice from its opponents on how its leader should look.

The concern is not that protesters will listen to Edi Rama or read TemA and remove Goxhaj.

The real risk is the opposite.

After this campaign against him, they may start believing that he has “terrified Edi Rama” and turn him into a cause. That is how political fanaticism works, just as Sali Berisha turns every attack on Flamur Noka into one more reason to defend him.

That would perversely damage the protest, leaving it shaped by people who pretend to attack the kind of leader they actually want as an opponent.

Originally published in Albanian as: Lëreni protestën të nxjerrë udhëheqësin e saj!