By Lorenc Vangjeli

In 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. An act that engulfed all of humanity in the carnage of World War I. The assassination was just the spark that set fire to a Europe engulfed in a wild wave of nationalism, bound by a complex system of political and military alliances and where its leaders, kings, emperors, tsars and sultans, were bound by blood and endless kinship, with open rivalries and competition for markets and colonies, but also with a Balkans like a powder keg in its backyard. He was the fatal bullet and the pretext, but the causes were elsewhere.

A full 112 years later, just a few hundred kilometers from Sarajevo, the Flamingos of Albania did not fire their weapons. On the contrary, at least formally, an incredible network of the most fluid alliances of the most incredible, geopolitical, ideological, financial and global security interests, traditional media and social media algorithms, anarchists, the far left and other actors, all against the backdrop of a new modern religion, environmentalism and a wonderful core of Albanian idealists, became a human fence in front of the supposed firing squad from Tirana against the Flamingos.

Albania is the stage, but the drama is played out with other actors and factors. Albania is the pretext, the causes are many times deeper.

This is how it seemed to begin, but now in Albania the protest of idealists is a desperate battle against the frustration caused by a hardened political elite, the cause not of the sale, but of the systematic robbery of the common homeland. The human core of the protest is enraged by a motley minority that banally opposes honest work. It is against politics, which in Albania is the only big business with guaranteed profit and which does not even pay taxes. It is the rejection of poverty as a criminal and unappealable crime in Tirana, Heartbreak is the currency of exchange that the protesters give to politics which in pluralism has not been able to be built as a mechanism for solving the country's countless problems, but which has turned into a problem to be solved.

The protest may keep the Boulevard occupied for the whole of June, or even longer, but even if it shrinks from the heat of Tirana, no one can bet that it will not rekindle again, even stronger in October. That's when the university year begins and the cycle starts all over again. Therefore, the approach to the problems raised by the protest should be an operation at the heart of the system and not bandaging the wounds that are now screaming in pain.

Whether its supporters or critics, from official politics on the left and right who belittle it or tear it apart to turn it into a political movement, know that in that field they have won the bet. The strength of the protest lies precisely in the numbers without names, in the massiveness without representation, in the unifying anonymity and not in the individuals who divide it; its strength lies paradoxically in the lack of identification with only a few portraits that would privatize it and, even worse, privatize it. At least at this moment. The union on the Boulevard of the many transversal sensitivities of Albanian society that at the moment knows how to reject what we have extremely well, but has not been called upon to affirm how we should be, is its magic. And it is now also public property.

Both the invitations drawn by Rama and Berisha's attempts to intervene in the protest are equally fatal for him. In this area, the two veterans of the lodge have in their favor exactly what would normally disqualify them: despite the skeletons they have locked in the closet, they have the experience and ready-made organizational structures. The first, Rama with the strength of the accumulated power, the second, Berisha, even with an unexpected gift that could come from the other side of the Atlantic, the removal of Non Grata, are naturally together and against the protest. Even when they mock him, even when they promise to join him.

The backdrop of the protest, what seems to be taking place on the Washington-Brussels axis, the creation of conditions for a battle in Washington between an atypical president like Mr. Trump and the traditional American and European political class, the mobilization of the classical and social media on the borders of the extraordinary, are ultimately a mirror to see what is going wrong in Albania. They are evidence and the opportunity to understand why, after the fall of the grotesque Albanian communism, Albania is building a so-called hybrid democracy, unjust, dishonest, criminalized, morally ruined; Albania is turning into a luxury ghetto for a privileged minority and a giant dormitory for everyone else.

This is why Rama should take the protest seriously and not compete with them in inventing memes. He should not see it through the same funny glasses that he sees Berisha's opposition. Unfortunately for him as the leader of the majority, the official opposition has been like a drunkard for years, who, with his next drink, finds the same pit to fall into. Rama is not fighting with the Flamingos or the bloggers who post alongside them on the Boulevard. He is not even fighting with the expanded circle of his opponents, who are now being called upon to appeal by the international media that until yesterday pampered him as an exotic character. He is mainly fighting with the model that he himself invented and that has kept him in power until now. The Flamingos of Zvërnec are the flyers that brought him this very message by flying on the Brussels - Washington airline. The Albanian flamingos, unlike the Serbian anarchist with a cobra in his hand, will most likely be remembered as the harbingers of the moral revolution in Albania. The rest is a repeated history of reptiles that this country on the edge of the Balkans and Europe has an extraordinary ability to give birth to, to love at first and hate later; reptiles that bow their heads to the homeland and feed on its soul.