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100 days of protest: Whose Albania is it?

2026-09-07 17:58:40Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA THOMA GëLLçI
100 days of protest: Whose Albania is it?
Scenes from the protest

With the appearance of Christopher Columbus who had just discovered an unknown land, the daughter of US President Trump, Ivanka, revealed in an interview given some time ago that she had discovered a wonderful island, on which she had walked barefoot to the top and had seen a wild place, very beautiful and with extraordinary potential. The island was called Sazan. Albanians, of course, had long known that the island was there, but when a small place is discovered by a famous person, the discovery takes on a different significance and the locals may begin to doubt whether they have truly known their country.

Her husband, Jared Kushner, also revealed that he had gone for a ride on the yacht of a billionaire friend, Rothschild, and this pleasant company was also joined by the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama. Kushner was impressed by the vision of the Albanian Prime Minister and, about a year later, decided to invest in the construction of a super-luxury resort in Sazan, in collaboration with several Arab funds. The government, meanwhile, had met, changed the law on protected areas, and Parliament voted on the change just as quickly.

Meanwhile, in the lagoon opposite, in Zvërnec, an Albanian company had begun fencing off part of the protected park with barbed wire, including the coastal area, while heavy bulldozers had moved in to prepare the infrastructure for another resort. Ownership conflicts led local residents to protest.

Environmentalists had long been sounding the alarm about the dangers to the lagoon's flora, fauna, and rare species, but in tired Albania, where people have a thousand more pressing concerns than bread, wages, medicine, and children running away, their voices had fallen on deaf ears. And who asked about a few pelicans that fed on frogs, a few turtles, and a few other birds and insects whose names no one knows?

It took the brutal intervention of a private security company, beating a local resident, knocking him unconscious, and then dragging him across the field, for the Albanians to open their eyes.

The footage made the rounds on social media, and people began to look at each other in surprise and fear. What had until then seemed like a local property dispute and a quixotic fight to protect a few birds suddenly became something else.

People took to the streets without calling on any party, without buses, without lists, without party branches and without patrons to write down their names. The official opposition, led by Sali Berisha, busy at the time with efforts to secure a visa for a trip to America, so that he could then show the Albanians that he was no longer "non grata", hastened to distance himself from the protest and to explain that the Democratic Party was in favor of Kushner's investment, because such an investment was a great fortune that was finally coming to our poor homeland. Helbete, the investor in this case was the son-in-law of the American president and, for Sali Berisha, that was enough to come to the defense, perhaps not for the first time, of the practices of the Rama government, which he attacked from morning to night like a drug lord.

But young Albanians, a good part of whom were born and raised during the years that we continue to call democracy, asked a question that politics had not anticipated: whose is Albania? Is it our homeland or a commodity that can be divided, surrounded, given away and its legal status changed depending on the name and financial power of the one who knocks on the government's door? They held the entire political class responsible for the situation. Large and unprecedented protests in Albania erupted in the streets of Zvërnec and filled, as never before, the main boulevard of Tirana with chants: "The homeland is not for sale!"

This call was immediately met with figures. Four billion here, five billion there, billions of dollars and euros flying over the heads of Albanians with such ease that one began to feel guilty if one asked where the projects, contracts, sources of financing and concrete deadlines were. When billions are mentioned, the citizen must be amazed and silent, because any question can be interpreted as hostility towards development.

Albanians had heard this music before. They had heard it when there was talk of transforming the port of Durres, of two or three billion dollars in investment, of a yacht port that would turn the city into a Dubai of the Adriatic, of huge international capital and of a development that would change the entire area. Then, slowly, behind the billions, a much more earthly mechanism emerged: apartments sold in the pit, the money from the sales helping to finance other constructions and a model much more connected to the property market than to the river of foreign capital that had been created that would flow into Albania.

Little by little, strange connections between property theft, drug money, and investors who change names every season began to come to light. And the river of protest, or the so-called “Flamingo Revolution,” took its course, which today marks 100 days.

But during these hundred days, something even more important has happened. The very demands of the protest have changed. What began with Zvërnec, with protected areas, with the transparency of projects and with the cancellation of some legal changes, has slowly overcome the issue that brought them to the streets. Protesters have begun to understand that a law can be canceled today and another similar one can be voted on tomorrow, that a project can be stopped in one place and appear in another, and that, if the mechanism that produces these decisions does not change, the battle will start every morning from scratch.

That is why the protest today no longer just demands the annulment of some laws, nor just transparency for Sazani, Zvërnec or the next project. It demands an end to the transition. Not by declaring by decree that the transition is over, but by changing the political system that produces and reproduces it every day.

Because the Albanian transition is no longer a period of transition from one system to another. After 35 years, it has become a way of governing. Governments change, but the party that comes to power inherits the administration, the state's resources and the temptation to use them; business continues to seek proximity to politics, the law continues to bend in the face of powerful interests and institutions remain overly dependent on the people who run them.

Thus, the protest demand has become more radical in the true sense of the word: it has gone to the root of the problem. It does not just demand the removal of one government to bring in another that will use the same rules. Albania has tried this several times and each rotation has been presented as the beginning of a new era, while after a few years we have ended up discussing the same diseases again.

The protest demands new rules of the democratic game. It demands a change in the way representatives are elected, so that the citizen has more power over who he sends to Parliament and the party leader has less power over the list of those who will become deputies. Because a deputy who owes his seat to the president has much more reason to obey the president than the citizen he theoretically represents.

It also requires a change in the way major decisions are made. It cannot be normal for decisions that change the use of territory, the status of protected areas or the fate of public assets to pass from government to Parliament quickly, while citizens are only left with the right to find out after they have been made. Democracy is not just the right to elect a government every four years and then give it a blank check for everything that happens until the next election.

The protest has also raised the issue of term limits for the highest state and political leaders. A democracy where the same people can lead for decades produces not only power, but also networks of power, dependencies, economic interests and institutions that are taught to function around the person. Term limits are not a punishment for a successful politician. They are a defense mechanism for the system, because democracy is not built on the belief that we will always have a good person at the top, but on rules that limit even the best person.

Likewise, a real separation of powers is required, not a separation that is beautifully written in the Constitution and then dissolved in practice. Parliament cannot be the government's notary, independent institutions cannot measure their independence by their relationship with the next prime minister, and the administration cannot be a territory where the state and the party coexist to the point where it is barely clear where one ends and the other begins.

This is why the hundred-day protest is unusual. It started from a concrete conflict, but today it is not just asking what will be done with a lagoon. It is asking how the Republic should function. And that makes it harder to digest than a protest that only demands the resignation of a minister, because you can change the minister and continue with the same system, whereas here the system itself is being asked to change.

Precisely for this reason, the fight against it has been so strong. Protesters have been called ravens, crows, sold out, bought. They have been called desperate, losers, wretched, manipulated and, when the local vocabulary has not been enough, foreign agents have been called to help. Protesters have been declared, as the case may be, agents of Greece, Serbia, Iran or agents of whoever is needed that week.

And how does the government respond after a hundred days? Instead of saying that it needs to change the way it governs, it has said that it needs to change the way people see governance. The achievements need to be better explained to them, they need to be shown how to read developments, and new mechanisms for approaching the citizen must be created, with names that sound nice and Albanian: "Besa", "Prania Besnike", "Pasqyra Albania".

But this is where the two philosophies diverge. The government thinks the problem is communication with the citizen, while the protest says the problem is the rules. The government thinks it should explain to the citizen better what it has done; the protest wants the citizen to have more power to decide what the government can do. One side wants a better picture of reality, the other wants to change the reality that the picture shows.

In the end, this is why, after a hundred days, the protest cannot be measured solely by the number of people who come out each evening to the square. Its sustainability has done something more important: it has shifted the debate from a fence to property, from property to the law, from the law to governance, and from governance to the political system itself.

One hundred days ago, the question was what was happening in a field near the Zvërnec lagoon. Today, the question is why, after 35 years, we continue to have a system that produces the same conflicts, the same concentration of power, and the same need to start the transition from scratch after each election. The protest has given its answer: it is not enough to change the people at the top, if we do not change the rules that give them the same power. After one hundred days, the protest is undoubtedly the winner. It dictates today the events of the day, the dynamics of politics, the agenda of the majority, and the political debate in the country.

The greatest achievement of these 100 days is that, while Ivanka “discovered” Sazan, Albanians got to know their politicians better. They discovered that those who pose as opponents are, in fact, the same and that, in the fight for change, they cannot rely on the opposition that “sells out for a visa”. Therefore, in these 100 days, they also discovered something about themselves. They discovered that they are no longer content with the role of spectator, but have decided to demand accountability for the decisions that are made about the territory, public property and the future of the country and that they will oppose not only a project, but the entire way in which decisions are made. In the end, this is also a question of sovereignty: not a big word for official ceremonies, but the right of citizens to have their say in the Albania that belongs to them.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

100 days

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Lutfi Dervishi / 2026-09-07 17:47:46Point of Views

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