Ibizagate and the bitter Albanian political reality

While researching Austrian websites and media, I was impressed by a "strange" corruption case: Ibizagate. Austrian politician Heinz – Christian Strache on May 18, 2019 resigned from the post of the Austrian government's vice-chancellor, and then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced the end of the coalition between the ÖVP (Austrian People's Party) and the FPÖ (Free Party of Austria, which represents the extreme right populist) and announced new elections in September 2019. For Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kunz, the reputation and name of Austria was more important than the reputation of his government and his name. (If he were somewhere else, he would continue to stay in power.) So far, there is no problem, because politicians come and go according to the situation. But when it comes to why this Austrian politician resigned, it's really heavy. The reason for the resignation was the participation in what is called Ibiza - Affair or Ibizagate or Strache - Affair. So what was all this? - Ibizagate was a real scandal, which greatly shocked Austrian politics in general, because it showed that even Austrian politics was not immune to such common cases in countries with fragile democracies. Heinz – Christian Strache, the chairman of the Austrian Free Party together with Johann Gudenus, a very important exponent of this party and his wife Tajana Gudenus met in a villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza with the niece of a Russian oligarch in July 2017, who went by the name Aliona Makarova and who posed as the granddaughter of Russian oil and gas entrepreneur Igor Makarov and also held a Latvian passport. And therefore it could invest without a problem in the European Union. She promised both Austrian politicians possible donations to the Freedom Party and favorable deals for major economic investments. Strache even suggested that the Russian investor "donate larger sums of money to an allegedly non-profit "association" to support the Freedom Party. In this way, the law on party financing would be avoided, as well as a report to the Austrian Administrative Court. So both Austrian politicians were willing to corrupt and circumvent Austrian laws in order to benefit from secret donations and to take covert control of independent media ie. non-partisan. All this captured in a video recorded a few months before the elections. This scandalous video was published in May 2019 by two well-known German media Süddeutsche.de and Spiegel Online. The scandal generated a great deal of national and international attention. The next day, the two main protagonists resigned and surrendered to Austrian justice. Let's return to our unusual political reality. The Albanian political reality is extremely rich with such cases. What do such cases teach us about us, the Albanians, our politics and justice? Every day the ears of Albanians are used to "bombshell" or political "scoop" news, so that, if something like this happens, they think that he or she will give peace to SPAK and Albanian justice. Or every time a political scandal happens, instead of jumping up to justice and taking measures against the case, The accused himself or herself counter-attacks through blackmail and slander against the system in general, throwing counter-accusations of alleged "witch hunting" or "political hunting", because this is the right tactic and the most affordable way to get out of this without getting wet. issue", because the most scandalous thing about every scandal is the fact that we, the people, get used to the scandal and do not act strongly. While for trivial or unimportant cases, such as If X or Y was caught in passive or active corruption with 10,000 Lek or 50,000 Lek, justice and the SPAK are torn apart and trumpeted as a success story and as a law enforcement case. The world has dozens of such cases of corruption, where everyone is equal before the law. The freshest case is the case of former French President Sarkozy, who was sentenced to 3 years in prison. because he had personally intervened with a French judge in a case of corruption, or more precisely, corruption and influence peddling, through a secret telephone line, which was discovered through wiretapping by the French judiciary. But as the Belgian poet Louis Scutenaire has said, scandal is not making a scandal, because scandal has become normal and is sitting cross-legged in reality and our political and social life. Therefore, these local political elections showed once again that voter participation was low, which shows that people want to leave the old and find the new. But where? – Always to ourselves. To hope, think and act strongly against negative social phenomena. This applies more to our Albanian justice system.