Opinion from Muriel
The political debate that followed the July 2026 elections for the Democratic Party secretariat suffers from a chronic shortsightedness. Most observers are fixated on a new term: “Mulism,” this mechanical servility that obeys without question, grabs the camera, and excludes any critical voice.
But this phenomenon is being wrongly treated as an isolated anomaly. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “Great historical events and characters appear twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” If “Mulism” is today’s farce, Berishism is the tragedy and the political model that meticulously produced it over three decades. Consequences can never be fought by amnestying the causes.
By entering the genetic code of this subjugation, it is understood that isolating the control of the apparatus as a personal defect of some individuals is a false intellectual comfort. This system seeks and reproduces servility as the exclusive condition of survival in its pyramid. It is no coincidence that the deputy Agron Gjekmarkaj had baptized this culture as the “enverism of democracy”, making Berisha himself responsible for a model that suffocates the freedom and pluralism that he claims to defend.
This matrix was broken down centuries ago by Étienne de La Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servilism, where he explained that it is not weapons that protect a tyrant, but a pyramidal network of beneficiaries who support each other to guarantee institutional survival. In this light, “mulism” is nothing more than today’s operational network that protects the center.
This institutional diagnosis suggests that internal democracy has become self-imposed and that the opposition network is now operating on a kind of autopilot. As the investigative network Reporter.al reported: “Berisha’s unrivaled race for the leadership of the DP risks sinking the party politically.” The 2025 defeat confirmed this prediction, but the apparatus continues to shut itself down.
Instead of electoral expansion, the party has entered a phase of conscious contraction, where legitimacy is no longer sought from the gray voter or the middle classes of society, but from the strict control of the party's branches in the districts, group sections and internal officials. When victory is abandoned as a national project, the only thing left to manage is political property and the administration of silence within the walls of the house.
We are dealing with the transformation of the logo into a limited liability company—a “PD Sh.pk”—where the goal is no longer power, but maintaining the opposition monopoly to negotiate personal survival behind the scenes.
"In a political joint-stock company, you cannot change the bankruptcy of the enterprise by blaming the counter managers, while the Board of Directors continues to keep the same losing strategy intact. The opposition is not resurrected by attacking the ranks of implementers, but by dismantling the monopoly of decision-making."
For this very reason, this war on the facade misses the point. Critics who attack “mulism” as a problem in itself are simply treating the symptom as if it were the disease. Blaming appointed administrators for corporate decisions is either analytical naivety or a conscious amnesty of the true owner of political stock.
Sociologist Robert Michels, in The Iron Law of Oligarchy, explained that pyramidal structures do not allow the free circulation of elites; they admit new elements only if they adopt the same submissive behavior. One cannot heal the body of the opposition by striking the executioners while leaving intact the mechanism that controls candidacies, expulsions, and membership lists, sequestered in the interests of the leadership.
At the conclusion of this analysis of the morbid symptoms of in-betweenness, the political thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote a phrase that describes this impasse with surgical precision: “The crisis arises precisely when the old is dying and the new fails to be born; in this in-betweenness a series of morbid symptoms appear.”
“Mulism” is precisely this symptom. The old model of Berishism can no longer bring power, but the new model — based on free competition and meritocracy — is not being allowed to emerge for fear of losing control of the seal.
Any political battle that aims to revive the opposition by attacking the consequences but sparing the cause is destined to fail cyclically. The crooked path of this last kilometer is not solved by changing the crisis manager, but by looking the truth in the eye: if you defend the model that produces rigidity, you have automatically accepted defeat. Otherwise, the party will continue to move backwards, stubbornly believing that it is marching forward.
