Cut-and-paste for Albanian Prime Ministers
TIRANA (Reuters) - When a politician speaks, the public may feel they have heard it all before, but this has taken on a whole new meaning in Albania.
An apparent cut-and-paste in a keynote speech by Prime Minister Sali Berisha had him mouthing the same lines spoken by his famously verbose predecessor Fatos Nano, Albanian television said with glee Wednesday.
Top Channel television broadcast Berisha, a conservative, reading three paragraphs of a speech on energy policy, followed by a clip of Nano, a socialist, delivering the same quotes three years earlier. The cryptic wording was virtually identical
Top Channel said its reporters got suspicious after hearing Berisha utter the phrase “solving the system of equations” over the chronic power crisis, a formulation in Albanian that reeked of Nano’s prolix speech.
“He was speaking a language that struck us as not naturally his own,” Top Channel editor Bledar Zaganjori told Reuters. “We looked at the previous strategy speech (by Nano) and found out the texts were almost identical.”
