Lubonja in “Le Monde”: The protests in Albania are an unprecedented civic movement; Europe should support Albanians and push the corrupt government toward resignation

For nearly a month, the country has been gripped by protests, as Albanian citizens demand the departure of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

This wave of reaction has not been confined to just one area, but has spread to other cities in Albania, as well as to the Diaspora, where the call for Rama’s resignation has been raised in unison.

In an analysis for the prestigious French daily “Le Monde,” Fatos Lubonja presented a broad overview of these protests, stressing that Europe should support this civic movement and, in his view, force the corrupt government to resign.

Fatos Lubonja’s response for Le Monde

To fully understand the reasons that have driven the mobilization against the megalomaniac project of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s tourist complex on the island of Sazan and in the Zvërnec lagoon, Lubonja argues that one must look earlier into Albanian history.

He recalls the 1920s, when Zog I, not yet king, was prime minister at a time when fascism was rising to power in Italy. Zog’s political support was based on a militia of 200 men, while he himself came from a family of landowners during the Ottoman Empire. At one point, Zog, aligned with one of the rival factions in the struggle for power, asked the Italian government to finance this militia and, in return, offered hectares of forest he owned to the Italian national railway company, promising that once he took power he would pursue policies in favor of the Kingdom of Italy. According to him, the offer was accepted.

At the same time, the trade agreement and the maritime transport agreement were signed between the two governments in 1923. Two years later, Zog became president of the Republic, while having signed a secret military pact, followed in 1926 by the pact of friendship and security with Italy. During the reign of King Zog [1928-1939], Albania, according to Lubonja, became an Italian semi-colony until its occupation by Rome.

He describes this episode as meaningful for the way relations have been built between a small country, its leaders, and foreign powers or empires. According to him, the history of Albania and the Albanians has been shaped by two elements: vassalage and the country’s peripheral position. Through vassalage, he says, local leaders derived legitimacy from the services they offered to the center of the empire. During the Ottoman Empire, that main service was sending soldiers to war. On the other hand, the peripheral position meant that the center allowed them to rule according to local customs, tolerating abuses and blocking reforms that from time to time might have been progressive.

According to Lubonja, this pattern was later repeated with Italy, then with the USSR, China and, after the fall of communism, with what he calls the Western empire. From this perspective, Jared Kushner’s luxury hotel project represents an updated version of the same paradigm and helps explain Prime Minister Edi Rama’s stance. He argues that Rama’s power rests on managing four interests: those of the oligarchs; those of organized crime, which, according to him, over the past two decades has become the main investor in the Albanian economy; those of the media, where the first two groups have invested heavily; and those whom Albanians call “our strategic partners,” namely the United States and the European Union, which for Tirana constitute the new empire.

Lubonja says that, convinced his political survival depends on them, the Albanian prime minister has constantly invested in his relationship with the Western international community. He recalls that a few months before Trump came to power, although he was very close to the American Democrats, Edi Rama made moves to establish friendly relations with the Republican candidate. In this context, he says Rama one day boarded Jared Kushner’s yacht and promised to give him a part of Albania, an action he compares in purpose to offering land to Giorgia Meloni for the construction of a refugee camp, just like King Zog once gave his forest to the Italians.

The shameless exclusion

According to him, this auctioning off of Albania serves not only the interests of Trump’s son-in-law, but also those of Albanian oligarchs and organized crime, who control the country’s most influential media outlets and to whom, not by chance, the government has granted strategic investor status. This, he stresses, means the state gives them strong backing to build tourist and residential complexes along the Albanian coast, making access to the sea increasingly difficult for Albanians.

It is precisely this shameless exclusion, according to Lubonja, that lies at the root of public anger. He says the revolt is not linked only to Jared Kushner’s project, but, in a broader sense, to the fate of an Albania built by this criminal system, which not only excludes Albanians from decision-making, but steals public spaces and common goods from them every day, to the point that the lack of prospects has produced and reinforced mass emigration. In this spirit, he also explains the strongest slogans of the protest: “Albania is not for sale,” “Boycott the media,” “We want a new Albania.” According to him, through this uprising, now known as the “Flamingo Revolution,” because of the large presence of flamingos in the Zvërnec lagoon, the Albanian people are refusing to remain in the position of the vassal.

In the case of the Kushner project, he notes that Edi Rama’s objective of serving the empire, with the aim of strengthening support for himself, proved paradoxically counterproductive. This, according to Lubonja, happened because the Albanian uprising cast a strong light not only on how environmental protection is treated in the West, but also on the control of decision-making by a very small minority, as well as on the consequences of Trump’s highly irritating domestic and foreign policies within the Western empire itself.

In conclusion, he stresses that the problem of the vassal state-empire relationship remains unresolved for Albanians who hope to one day live in an Albania that is a member of the EU, where the rule of law prevails, but who find it very difficult to make their voices heard by European institutions. According to Lubonja, the sincere commitment of Western states in the early 1990s to help build democracy and the rule of law in countries like Albania has gradually turned into policies that view these countries mainly as economic and geostrategic resources. In this context, he notes a strong tendency among Western leaders to silently support authoritarian rulers, or to turn a blind eye to their abuse of power, when they offer useful solutions, such as the camp for processing asylum seekers, or carry out pharaonic whims, such as the Kushner plan. With the “Flamingo Revolution,” he concludes, the Albanian people, and especially the youth, have begun an unprecedented civic movement. His hope is that Europeans will support its aims: abandoning the Kushner plan, forcing the corrupt government to resign, and rebuilding democracy in Albania.