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Protests, Albania can teach Europe a lesson about self-respect

2026-06-08 17:10:13Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA LEA YPI
Scenes from the protest

"That's how we found it. We swam to the island, took a barefoot walk to the top, and were just amazed. And over many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential."

If the woman who shared her desire to improve a foreign island had stepped off a smugglers' boat, her dream would have been shattered in one of those migrant detention centers that the Albanian government has recently built with Italy.

But the boat in question was a multimillion-dollar yacht, and the woman walking barefoot to the top was Ivanka Trump. The dream came true only after a call from the country’s prime minister, Edi Rama, and the volunteer offer of her husband, Jared Kushner, and one of his companies to transform a protected wildlife area into luxury real estate.

The Albanian government insists that no deal has been reached. But it has not hidden its enthusiasm. Who can blame it? After decades of transition from communism to capitalism and protracted EU accession negotiations, Albania has lost more than 1.2 million of its citizens to migration. It has low levels of production, an agricultural sector in urgent need of modernization, and a higher education sector in crisis since the privatization of universities in the 1990s.

Without industrial, financial or human capital to offer to the global market, the only thing left to sell is nature. Even tourism, which has been on the rise recently, has required a concerted government campaign to improve the country's image.

Sustainable development and environmental protection are easy to demand, but costly and difficult to achieve. Under competitive globalization, real estate and luxury tourism generate faster growth, even if they increase inequality and deplete natural resources. The models on offer are those that the richest countries tried 30 years ago and now regret.

Albanians know that real estate speculation without state support means that ordinary citizens will struggle to buy an apartment or pay rent. They know that luxury tourism means that vacationing in your own country will become a privilege for a few. With no unions to speak of and a labor movement that only appears in communist-era images of May Day parades, working conditions are so exploitative that only those from even more desperate countries are willing to take the jobs that arise.

Albanians simply pack their things and move to other countries, faced with abuse and xenophobia. They keep their heads down, knowing that it is the price they must pay for a future for their children.

In May 2025, the ruling Socialist Party won the elections for the fourth time. At around 44%, turnout was at a historically low level, despite the expansion of the vote to Albanians in the diaspora for the first time. There was no election manifesto, no principled debate with the opposition (whose leader, Sali Berisha, appeared mostly depicted as an owl on government social media). In a country where more than 90% of citizens support European integration, it was enough to fill billboards with photos of European passports and write a single date: membership by 2030.

This is the other side of European integration: criticism of government becomes opposition to Europe itself. There is no choice between competing visions of society, only between different managers of the same inevitable trajectory. With politics reduced to technocratic rule, the only lens through which political conflict can be read is “corruption”: as if post-communist societies carried it in their blood, as if the problem were individual transgressions rather than the rules themselves.

For years, Albanians accepted this with the same fatalism they accept a natural disaster. Now, young people are rebelling. The current protests involve a recent law on strategic investments, which reinforces the oligarchic capture of the state. This escalated when heavy machinery was moved into a protected coastal wetland and a viral video showed private security guards beating a protester while state police stood by.

A generation accustomed to thinking that the only questions are how quickly to build infrastructure for tourism, how quickly to integrate into the EU, how efficiently to attract investment, now asks: should it be like this? Should democracy be the rule of a handful of super-rich?

It's an inspiring example of civic activism that I hadn't seen since the fall of communism, whose international visibility is undoubtedly helped by the media attention to the Trump family.

But why now? The opposition has tried in vain for years to mobilize the public against, well, “corruption.” Fires have been lit in Parliament and Molotov cocktails have been thrown at government buildings. But in the case of Kushner, the opposition is in agreement with the government. Perhaps this is what enabled thousands of young people to flood the streets: the certainty that their disobedience would not be caught. It is touching to see them singing, dancing, cleaning the streets after the protests and giving flowers to the police. Unlike the old opposition, they are not giving up on the state, but insisting that it belongs to them.

In recent years, the response to political disenfranchisement in post-communist Europe has been the rise of xenophobic movements. Only the far right has reaped the benefits of protests against the system. The case of Albania proves that another kind of mobilization is possible. Far from regressive nationalism or nostalgia, the movement’s single rallying cry, “Albania is not for sale,” reflects something that the socialist government has forgotten: that self-respect is the prerequisite for being respected by others, and that a people willing to sell their souls for investment will discover, in the end, that their souls were the only valuable thing they had.

There is something admirable and fragile about a movement without a leader, without a program, without an infrastructure to support it in the long run. Leaderless movements are harder to co-opt, but easier to infiltrate and disperse. To be effective, they must move from resistance to proposal, finding suppressed political unity by rallying around a single cause.

Yet as long as democratic politics is captured by the wealthy few, politicians come and go, corruption trials satisfy the desire to punish, and civic activism provides the illusion of change. One by one, societies find themselves caught up in the same paradoxes of capitalist development. The challenge is not just how to replace individuals, but how to build a new system.

For once, though, Albania doesn’t need to catch up with Europe – it can lead. A generation willing to mobilize for an alternative model of development, one that rejects oligarchic capture and links environmental protection with democratic legitimacy, should not be feared, but celebrated. Instead of becoming “like the rest of Europe,” as the old slogan went, Albania can teach the old continent a lesson in self-respect.

*Lea Ypi is professor of political history and philosophy at the London School of Economics and author of the books “Free” and “Humiliated (Surviving in an Age of Extremes).”/  The Guardian

Editorial title, original title: Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania. This could be a shining light for Europe


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