The Protest That Brought Down the Myth of the Painter and Brought the Notary of Crime to the Fore

Andi Bushati argues that although no one is in a position to say with certainty when Edi Rama’s rule may come to an end, one thing now seems indisputable to him: the trajectory of his decline can no longer be reversed. To read this development, he focuses on how the prime minister’s image in Western media has been transformed after the recent protests in Albania, dubbed the “flamingo revolution.”

According to Bushati, the picture built up over the years around Rama in the foreign press has been overturned. From the figure of a reformer, modernizer, and leader who could steer the country toward Europe, he is increasingly being portrayed as a symbol of corruption, inequality before the law, and the influence of oligarchs on the country’s economic life.

He argues that the latest protests, covered by media outlets such as The Guardian, Le Monde, and The Times, have directly influenced the change in public perception of the government. From this perspective, the new reporting has placed the emphasis on corruption and on the obstacles Albania faces on its path toward European integration.

The full article:

No one is in a position to give a timeframe for when Edi Rama will fall, but it has now become clear to everyone that his political descent has no way back. More than any other indicator, this is shown by the portrait that Western media has begun to construct of the Albanian prime minister since the moment when what was later called the flamingo revolution erupted in the country.

Within this blessed month, which opened with the dragging away of a protester in Zvërnec and gradually gathered momentum on Tirana’s boulevard, the landscape has changed profoundly. For nearly two decades, the autocrat who rules Albania with an iron fist had been painted by foreign journalists as the artist who gave color to a gray capital, as the leader who could lead his people out of obscurantism, as the visionary who promised regional peace, and as the man who had the opportunity to bring the country into the great European family.

That postcard was burned in the most spectacular way possible in just 30 days. Today, Edi Rama is coming into view with everything he has sought to cover up over the years. In dozens of articles in The New York Times, The Guardian, Politico, The Times, CNN, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, devoted to Albania with an unprecedented intensity since the disastrous year of 1997, he is appearing as a politician who has fostered inequality before the law, institutional corruption, and has placed local oligarchs at the forefront.

From the self-proclaimed champion of EU integration, Rama is now being presented as the main obstacle to that objective. The Guardian, described as the bible of the British left, carried the voices of several MPs sounding the alarm over the damage to Albania’s aspirations on the road to integration. Le Monde treated the protest as a reaction against a system dominated by oligarchs and as the product of dark ties between business and power. Not by chance, that newspaper also quoted demonstrators who described the prime minister as someone who behaves as if the country were his property. The Times, meanwhile, reported the revolt of unaffiliated young people as a movement against corruption and the way the country is governed. Reuters, noting that thousands of protesters are demanding the prime minister’s resignation, linked that call to dissatisfaction with the government.

In a test that the Lapsi.al newsroom carried out a few days earlier using artificial intelligence search applications, it became clear that the media image built over many years through effort, money, and PR had collapsed in a very short time once it was confronted with the mirror of the civic movement.

Up to a point, all of this can even be justified. In every country and against every government, there is a segment of society that protests against the abuse of power, the arrogance with which it is exercised, and the tendency to sidestep the law. But what the flamingo revolution brought to the surface, through the magnifying glass placed on the Zvërnec affair, did not only show the tendency to sell off pieces of Albania as a way to secure international support in the White House, nor only the unwritten law of occult deals with oligarchs who have ‘carte blanche’ to bring land registries, courts, the police, and every other link of the state under their control.

This time, the scale of the challenge widened. Also thanks to SPAK files, which “coincidentally” emerged precisely when the protest broke out, confirmation was obtained of the criminalization to the very core of the Albanian economic system, fueled by cocaine money generated in Latin America and then sold on the old continent.

The towers signed off by Rama, his preferred businessmen, and the star architects featured in the “Albanian files” turned out to be fed by the flow of dirty cocaine money.

It was precisely this phenomenon, which from the Narta lagoon spread like an oil stain across the country’s entire map, that for the first time forcefully took over the international media. The Financial Times put the question directly to Edi Rama as to whether he was a padrino (Godfather). Even though he responded to his own citizens with a “Fuck You,” this did not stop The New York Times, the reference daily in the United States, from raising the question of how a person suspected of being a drug trafficker, Artur Shehu, could be involved in a project implicating the family of the U.S. president.

Likewise, this did not prevent the British newspaper The Times from suggesting that the involvement of people linked to money laundering was not entirely accidental. “The Kushner-linked project has become a symbol of anger over corruption and the penetration of capital of dubious origin,” the newspaper wrote.

So the first question that arises in the face of this radical change in the approach of the international media is this: would it have been possible, had Albanian youth not taken to the streets, for this portrait of Edi Rama to take shape, diametrically opposed to the one that had been sold for years?

The answer is self-evident. The flamingo revolution became the gravedigger of the cliché of the artist politician. This profile, built up with large sums of money, lobbying, and cunning, gave way to the suspicion that everything may have been merely the visible face of a medal that concealed the holding on to power and the survival of the economy in alliance with drug trafficking. The thesis long articulated in Albania, that of an informal economy serving to feed the system, to control the media, to buy elections, all under the mask of a false development designed together with internationally renowned architectural studios, finally found its place on the screens and pages of the West’s largest newspapers.

This remains one of the most visible effects of the movement that began in Zvërnec and went beyond it. It showed the world another portrait of Edi Rama. It is precisely for this reason that historians who one day will write about the fall of this regime should mark this date. Because this is where the crack in the international legitimacy of an autocrat began, one who used that facade as an instrument to rule over his own people.