Commentary by Erblin Vukaj
Erion Veliaj made his name organising protests against Fatos Nano’s government. Today, from pretrial detention, he says Prime Minister Edi Rama accuses him of encouraging protests against his own government. The man under whose leadership Veliaj became a minister and then mayor now appears, in Veliaj’s account, as the person seeking to remove him from city hall.
Between those two moments lies a career built on an ability to mobilise people and on closeness to Rama. That closeness is now giving way to a public confrontation.
On 2 November 2026, Veliaj published a letter alleging that Justice Minister Toni Gogu had relayed three demands from Rama: admit involvement in the “Flamingo Revolution” and the student protests, relinquish the leadership of Tirana, and stop consulting his lawyer, former Socialist MP Plarent Ndreca.
According to Veliaj, refusing would bring additional charges. He challenged Rama to produce evidence connecting him to the protests and ended his response with a blunt demand: “Otherwise, leave!”
Gogu confirmed the meeting on Friday, 30 October, but denied conveying the messages attributed to him. He said the visit concerned detention conditions and complaints raised by the defence. The meeting is confirmed; what was said remains disputed.
The political confrontation, meanwhile, is unmistakable. Veliaj is challenging Rama directly, far more openly than when he contested his dismissal by Rama’s government before the Constitutional Court.
My hypothesis about the “paranoia of power” rests on this tendency to read opposition as conspiracy and disobedience as betrayal. I use it as a political metaphor, not as a diagnosis or proof of Rama’s motives.
In a party led for so long by the same man, the conflict exposes a boundary: where does the leader’s authority over the party end, and where does an elected official’s mandate from the public begin?
From protest to power
Veliaj was no unknown when he joined the Socialist Party, or PS. MJAFT, founded in 2003, established him as an activist demanding accountability from those in government. Protests, public communication and organising young people became his initial political capital.
In 2008, G99 turned part of that activism into a party project, but won no parliamentary seat in the 2009 election. Veliaj joined the PS in 2011, while G99 continued without him. He moved from trying to build his own political force to pursuing the opportunities offered by one of the country’s two main parties.
Within the PS, he became secretary for youth and emigration, then an MP and minister of social welfare and youth in 2013. In 2015, he was elected mayor of Tirana. Within a few years, his ability to organise outside government had become an ability to build a career within it.
Rama opened decisive doors for him, but Tirana gave Veliaj weight of his own. An elected mayor has a mandate, an administration and political relationships that do not disappear when relations with the party leader cool.
That does not automatically make him Rama’s successor or rival. It does, however, make him harder to remove as though he were merely an appointed official.
The irony lies in his experience of protest: once part of his value to the PS, it now appears in Veliaj’s account as grounds for suspicion. Even if his allegation is disproved, the decision to make it public has changed his relationship with Rama.
From public defence to suspicion
This story did not begin with public abandonment. On 11 February 2025, the day after Veliaj’s arrest, Rama objected to pretrial detention interrupting Veliaj’s mandate. He called the anonymous material that had prompted the investigation a “novella” and compared the prosecution’s demand for remorse to the methods of the Sigurimi, Albania’s communist-era secret police. At the same time, he insisted that the justice system was independent and that determining guilt was not his role.
That makes today’s contrast all the more striking. Rama himself once used the arguments with which Veliaj now defends his mandate and his rights. What changed between them?
The candidate lists for the 2025 election were also read as a sign of cooling relations. Politiko described Etjen Xhafaj, Klotilda Bushka and Toni Gogu as figures close to Veliaj, left to compete on the open list. Their exclusion from the safer closed list was a fact; interpreting it as punishment of a political group remained a matter of analysis.
I believe the period of the “Flamingo Revolution” protests helps explain this shift. People took to the streets against the tourism project linked to Jared Kushner on the coast near Vlorë, raising concrete concerns about land, nature and protected areas.
Discontent spread beyond the environmental issue. The student protest on 13 October, accompanied by clashes with police, intensified the conflict. But the reasons for protesting slip out of view when everything is reduced to who is directing the protesters.
First came suspicions about Greece. On 2 June, Idajet Beqiri claimed that the protests were connected to the competition the investment would pose to tourism in Corfu. A BIRN investigation documented how Rama and PS representatives also fuelled the narrative of Greek interference. A photograph of a bus, presented on television as evidence, had been generated using artificial intelligence.
Rama then linked disinformation surrounding the Kushner project to Iran, including theories about relocating Palestinians to Albania. Iran denied the allegations. On 6 July, Taulant Balla attributed the protest to Sali Berisha. These statements did not establish who was funding or directing the protesters.
On 19 October, addressing senior police officials, Rama spoke of Russian and Iranian influence through fake social-media profiles and linked the violence to inspiration from Antifa. The published transcript presents no technical evidence substantiating that connection.
Voices in the square also challenged the government-versus-opposition divide. In Reuters’ reporting from the June protests, Vasfi Lushaj called for both Rama and Berisha to leave, holding them jointly responsible for the damage to land and protected areas.
Foreign influence, attempts by the opposition to claim a protest, and the role Veliaj says is being attributed to him are different allegations. A protest can have genuine grievances while attracting people who seek to exploit it. Each claim requires evidence of its own.
Those in power have partly acknowledged this distinction. On 19 July, Balla spoke of listening to the Flamingo protesters and reflecting on their concerns, while Rama acknowledged on 19 October that people also had legitimate grievances.
The problem is the weight given to explanations involving enemies, compared with accountability for poor governance. The more attention goes to the hand supposedly directing a protest, the less goes to why people take to the streets. When suspicion reaches a close associate, the debate risks becoming a test of loyalty within the party.
From “omertà” to defiance
“Omertà”, the mafia’s code of silence, is a forceful metaphor for political discipline. What interests me here is the expectation that associates who fall into trouble should not challenge their leader. Their silence alone proves no criminal pact.
Veliaj has publicly broken with that expectation. But his resistance had taken institutional form earlier, through the Constitutional Court battle over his mandate. In my view, that defence deserves attention precisely because it went beyond complaining to the party: he sought a ruling against its government.
On 3 November 2025, the Constitutional Court overturned the Council of Ministers’ decision to dismiss him, along with the part of the presidential decree that called a mayoral by-election in Tirana.
Legally, Veliaj exercised his right of appeal and won. Politically, he had refused to accept his removal by Rama’s government and had succeeded in stopping it.
The ruling did not acquit him in the criminal case. He faces charges of corruption and money laundering, which he denies. They must be judged on their evidence, separately from his conflict with Rama.
The archived reporting on the Veliaj case sets out allegations by SPAK, Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors. These concern payments from businesspeople who won public contracts and construction permits to companies and organisations linked to his wife, Ajola Xoxa. Regarding Harabel, Xoxa explained the funding as support for cultural activities and denied that it received money from Tirana Municipality.
Tirana and the next election
Why does control of Tirana carry so much weight in this confrontation? I believe one important reason is the local election on 9 May 2027, a date set by presidential decree on 30 October. Two days earlier, Veliaj had been transferred from Durrës to Fier. The proximity of those dates proves no causal connection, but the conflict is now unfolding against that electoral deadline.
For the PS, it matters who will represent it in the race, who will lead its political organisation and how it will handle the legacy of a mayor in pretrial detention. Will the next candidate defend Veliaj’s record or seek distance from him?
For Veliaj, retaining his mandate preserves his influence in that discussion. This is the basis of my hypothesis that the conflict also concerns influence over the next campaign. But the municipality’s administration, funds and resources are not the PS’s property. Using them for party purposes would be a separate problem, not an entitlement that passes from Veliaj to Rama.
In his speech on 11 February 2025, Rama moved from plans for the city to expectations of victory on 11 May, mentioning MPs and “all the municipality’s employees” in the same sentence.
Nine days later, on 20 February, he gathered the employees in Skanderbeg Square. He promised uninterrupted attention to the municipality until the course of Veliaj’s case became clearer. At the same event, he asked them not to repeat their protest outside the court, acknowledging the separation of institutions and the independence of the judiciary.
These two appearances show how quickly Rama placed himself at the centre of relations with the municipality after Veliaj’s arrest. The interweaving of city business and electoral expectations raises a question about the boundary between the institution and the campaign. It does not, in itself, establish a specific violation by every employee.
Even the identity of a successor remains part of Veliaj’s allegation: according to his letter, Gogu demanded that authority be delegated to Arbër Hajdari. Hajdari denied any involvement and dismissed the account as fantasy. Such an arrangement cannot be treated as fact.
Remembering 1981
Mehmet Shehu, prime minister since 1954, died on the night of 17–18 December 1981, after fierce criticism in the Politburo. The party was headed by Enver Hoxha, first secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania. The official account was suicide; the circumstances have never been fully established.
The meeting was a political judgment within the leadership, not a judicial trial. After Shehu’s death, Hoxha portrayed him as part of a conspiracy involving foreign powers. Purges and the execution of other officials followed.
Past closeness no longer offered protection. Instead, it became material for the accusation: the man who knew power from the inside was described as its most dangerous enemy, an agent working for multiple foreign powers.
It is this transformation of a close associate into a threat to the leadership that makes me bring 1981 into the discussion.
When guiding visitors around Tirana and talking about the dictatorship, I used to explain Hoxha’s fury towards Shehu in terms of his fear of losing power. That tendency to see the threat ever closer to oneself is what comes to mind in the Rama–Veliaj confrontation, too.
Today’s Albania is, of course, not Hoxha’s regime. The fact that Veliaj won in the Constitutional Court against his dismissal by the government is a fundamental difference. The analogy does not turn today’s courts into the Politburo, nor does it predict a repetition of Shehu’s fate.
For me, it helps us examine the language of a leadership that demands ever greater obedience. When discontent is explained mainly through conspiracies, a leader risks searching for enemies even among those who helped him govern. That is my concern about the “paranoia of power”. Veliaj’s guilt remains a matter of evidence; his right to challenge Rama cannot depend on that evidence.