DUI marked its 24th anniversary in Skopje's City Park, and leader Ali Ahmeti summed up the party's story in one sentence that says it all: "We started from zero, we left with a prime minister." The cake is cut, the speech is delivered, and behind the celebration sits a calculation about what comes next.

"We started from zero, with 1-2 percent of Albanians represented in institutions, and reached 20-22 percent," Ahmeti said. "We started from zero, we finished with a prime minister, now we have a parliament speaker and directors in many institutions." Numbers that, seen from the party's angle, really do tell a story of rising from the margin to the center of power.

But the most interesting part of the speech wasn't a look back - it was a call about the future. Ahmeti proposed that the Albanian parties sign a pact under which whichever party wins the Albanian bloc would represent Albanians in every future government. Translated: whoever wins the Albanian vote enters power, no matter who forms the government. That's a model where the seat in government is reserved in advance, and elections only decide who gets to take it.

Here it's worth stopping. The logic of "whoever wins the bloc enters power" sounds democratic, but it actually makes power dependent on ethnic arithmetic, not on politics and results. Twenty-four years on, the question for DUI is no longer how it climbed to the top - that's clear. The question is whether those years in power turned into a better life for the ordinary people who voted for it, or only into better positions for those on stage with the cake. The answer to that question isn't celebrated in a park.