Every Friday, Gabriel García Márquez's famous colonel would put on his only festive shirt, polish his shoes, and go down to the port in the foolish hope that the mail boat would bring him his missing retirement letter. In the digitalized Tirana of 2026, the same "drama" is unfolding behind high-resolution screens: The government expects to be written, but the "Public Consultation" servers are empty.
If you open the official website of the Public Consultation Portal (konsultimipublik.gov.al) today, the picture that appears before you is a monument to bureaucratic absurdity. Dozens of crucial draft laws, from the “Regulation on the monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions from maritime transport”, to the new law “On Procurement in the Field of Defense and Security”, “Credit Bureau”, “On the National Chamber of Commerce”, or “Employment Promotion”, hang in cyberspace as relics of a dialogue that does not exist.
In each of them, both in the "Consultation with Citizens" and in the "Consultation with Experts" category, the number of comments shines with an absolute zero. No expert spends even five minutes writing a career suggestion; no citizen trusts the feedback box anymore.
Why? Because everyone knows the open secret: this portal was never built to make the public's voice heard, but to tick a box on the long list of bureaucratic education tasks that Brussels requires.
European integration requires "transparency and inclusiveness." Brussels asks: "Do you consult civil society on laws?" The government proudly replies: "Yes, of course not! We have a super-modern digital portal!"
But the reality is that real political decisions, market reforms, fund allocations and concessions do not arise through these public online windows. They are cooked up in closed circles, in party offices, luxury restaurants and through occult lobbies where narrow financial interests have passed the law without the need for any "comment" or criticism from the public.
Why write to a government that only talks to itself? Public consultation in Albania is like a landline phone: you can talk as much as you want into the receiver, but on the other end all you hear is the sound of bureaucratic silence.
Citizens and experts have understood the game. They know that any comment made there would be treated at best as an administrative nuisance, and at worst as computer waste. Consequently, a 'silent boycott' is the most dignified response to an institutional farce.
And yet, the irony of power does not stop with portals gathering digital dust. Finally, as part of the ongoing reformatting of its image and propaganda, the government promises to open a major new platform: "Pasqyre Albania", another online mechanism where citizens, according to the official narrative, will be able to "cry out their troubles" and complain directly to the government and the prime minister.
But if experts and citizens can't write about laws that directly affect the economy and daily life, who will trust a digital "mirror" that only reflects the complacency of the government?
In Márquez's work, the colonel waits for his letter for decades, immersed in poverty but with heroic dignity. In today's Albania, the prime minister "has no one to write to", not because there is no post office or 5G network, but because citizens have realized that their letter will end up in the electronic waste bin before it reaches the decision-making table.
Below are the latest pages of the public consultation platform:
