All nominations aim somewhere. They are aimed at a specific audience and one does not need to be a political guru to understand this. The party leaders are aware of their vulnerabilities and try to cover them with appropriate choices of persons. Some nominations, however, also have a wider dimension, we could call it national, to the extent that they promote cases that touch the wider interests of our country. We should see the Beleris candidacy from this perspective. It puts the voice of Northern Epirus in the heart of Europe, in the European Parliament. This is the main priority of this particular candidacy and all the rest are the collateral political consequences.
That is, those who really believe that the rights of Northern Epirus are violated by the Albanian government and those who primarily believe that there is Northern Epirus and not just Southern Albania will choose Fredis Beleris. Well, as a matter of fact, the presence of Beleris on the New Democracy ballot paper also has a political aim, which is not ideologically colorless. However, its main dimension is national and not vote hunting, as the son of the imprisoned mayor also stated.
Its main objective is not to stop the leakage of votes to the right of the ruling party, but to hear the voice of the Northerners in the European Parliament.
If Beleris did not enter the ruling party’s ballot, what would be his fate? When he was released from prison, he would languish in obscurity or, at best, protest in vain about what he had suffered – and especially the theft of the mayor’s office – by the Rama regime. Because only the naive would believe that Fredis Beleris would ever return to his self-governing duties. The land of Himarra is gaining enormous economic value, and Rama and his friends want to completely control its tourist and residential development. They did not commit what they committed against him to restore him after two years. Therefore, those who argue that Beleris would be more useful if he remained in Northern Epirus do not correctly analyze Albania’s power structure, which is significantly different from European standards. This is precisely what his adventure proves, something that large European states pass by, because for them the business with the regime comes first. It is no coincidence that their supposed reaction – which we ultimately did not see – to the Beleris candidacy was the reason why government officials were cautious about this particular candidacy.
To recap, his presence in the European Parliament has primarily a national dimension. If he also has an impact on the electoral influence of the New Democracy, this is due to the fact that his imprisonment moved a category of citizens with particular sensitivities towards the Northern Continent. Its main objective is not to stop the leakage of votes to the right of the ruling party – for this purpose there were other nominations – but to hear the voice of the Northerners in the European Parliament.
