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For the rostrum, socialists and those who ask: But where are the people?

2025-11-29 23:12:05Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ADRIAN THANO
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We often hear that Albanians “don't stand up,” “don't protest,” “don't react.” But this is just one of those myths that politics, in all its colors, feeds on to justify itself.

The truth is simple and brutal: Albanians have protested. And they have been killed for it. What is happening is not a lack of reaction. It is a deeper, colder reaction: flight.

Leaving is a political act. When hundreds of thousands of young people and families leave the country, they are not just looking for a better life. They are sending a message to Albanian politics that needs no megaphone: "We don't trust you anymore."

Leaving is the clearest vote against a political class that for 30 years has been unable to produce security for tomorrow, to foster the feeling that honest effort leads somewhere. Leaving is a kind of silent referendum, where the ballot boxes are the airports and ports.

Classic protest requires courage, but the protest of escape is the abandonment of the belief that this country can change through today's parties, through today's leaders, or today's institutions that citizens no longer see as theirs.

We are a people exhausted by betrayal. January 21 was the culmination of a popular anger against the corruption and arrogance of power. The people came out, without knives, without weapons. They came out only with disappointment. And what happened? They were killed with bullets. For what? To see then how the party that raised them in protest and the party that was accused of corruption joined hands, then in joint governance as if the blood of the protesters did not matter.

Should people return to the streets today, be beaten, tear gassed, killed? For what? For an opposition that offers no guarantee that it is different from the government it denounces?

Albanians are not fleeing because they don't know how to protest. Albanians are fleeing because they no longer trust anyone. What a bitter irony that the man under whose mandate the largest civic protest in 30 years, January 21, was killed, today complains that "Albanians no longer protest." It is absurd to look for the crowd that you yourself killed. If this paradox escapes him or those who today lament the absence of the people in protests, then the problem is not with the people, but with this "political elite" that did not understand that silence is a wound they have inflicted on themselves.

In a left-wing political corner, emigration is also a symptom of an old disease: the lack of a welfare state, the complete deformation of social solidarity. In a country governed by a party that calls itself socialist, education, health, order, security have been stripped of their public function and have become services that are provided only to those who can afford to pay. Money has become a national “religion”. In this terrain of inequality, where the state withdraws and the citizen is left alone, why are we surprised by emigration? It is a direct consequence of a “socialism” that has only the name, because it abandoned the people long before the people abandoned the country.

So who to choose? The so-called right protects the interests of a handful, more precisely of a family. The so-called left ended up building a new elite of privileges. The new parties that were supposed to bring about the breach in the wall were quickly consumed by personalism, petty bargaining, and lack of vision. The people have only one way out.

Herein lies the great drama: flight is a protest, but it is also a collective surrender. It is a protest that damages precisely what it seeks to protect: the factories of minds, of hands, of the future.

But the one who fled is not a traitor. The one who fled is someone who has understood that the system has no intention of changing, that rotation is an old deception, that Albanian politics is a reorganization of castes.

Will classic protest return? More than a question, this is a fundamental dilemma. Is there a point at which a people understands that leaving is only an escape, not a solution? Is there a point at which collective commitment (what the left calls “social dignity”) returns to demand a functioning state?

This will depend on a single factor:

Will an opposition that inspires, not just instrumentalizes, ever emerge?

Until then, airports will remain our protest squares, calm, orderly, silent, but more political than any rally or podium.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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