Civic mobilization is one of the most discussed and consequently debated topics in political theory. However, Albanians did not need a special meeting with researchers of popular mobilization to pose a number of questions with appropriate probability. This article does not aim at all to be a mediocre synthesis of existing theories, but rather an attempt to explain the paradox of views that abound with the launch and expansion of the protest.

It all starts with the early and necessary question, why. Rebellion against the perception of injustice is almost always the common denominator. That said, the why constitutes an endless chubby matryoshka because every why contains another why and other hows. The most chubby matryoshka constitutes the main reasons for this revolt and these reasons agree with all of us who are incompatible. The difficult conjuncture of everyday life, coupled with the political circumstances of the last decade, have created the optimal conditions for the democratic autocracy that we witness today. Although nothing has changed fundamentally with the electoral process, the vote has been devalued
exponentially. Vote inflation is not an economic concept, but an Albanian political reality. For reasons independent of the popular will, political alternatives have become impossible. This is due to the uncanny mastery of political technology, which is nothing more than a manual on the well-known and proven techniques of political manipulation.

However, the theory requires masters to come to life, but even the masters need a little luck when it comes to technology of this magnitude. Perhaps more clearly stated, despite all the maneuvers and means used by the government to maintain power, the carnage that the opposition produced over the years was, although aided by luck, still great luck for the consolidation of the hegemony of this government. However, another ground of agreement between the incompatible is the complete blockage of the tangible political alternative. We do not want these, but those we want do not exist at the moment.

This damn impasse contributed to what seemed like the apoliticization of one of the most politicized European societies. The vast majority of Albanians, whether left or right, gradually distanced themselves from the identity representation with the traditional SP-PD parties. This created the ground for a long-forgotten situation in Albania, perhaps since the first decades of our state formation, that of principled political reflection. I do not think I am exaggerating when I allow myself to say that principles and reflections distanced from interests have been almost non-existent for the vast majority, except perhaps for episodic moments, in free Albania, that of the last 35 years. This freedom of individual political thought was the whole process that culminated in the phenomenal protest of these days that was decorated with the name Flamingo Revolution.

I say process because it took time to shape the social terrain capable of welcoming protests of this form. It was 2020, when during the Covid madness a police officer fatally shot a young man who did not obey you by not accepting the absurd curfew schedule of those times of hysteria. Then I wrote a few lines where I called out perhaps with hope more than with evidence for the wicks of the Albanian revolt: “There comes a moment when a person develops one of the most important habits, revolt. It appears when patience exceeds certain limits and a person becomes aware of the oppression being inflicted on him.

So much injustice and ridicule accumulated over the years, so many attempted revolts that revolt is being consolidated as the face of our people and as a result, the strength of character of this very nation is being shown." I believed and wrote myself in December 2020. It took six years from that moment and 83 mandates that crowned the uncontested hegemony of the power circus for this previously unseen face to appear in Albania over the last 35 years.

Of course, this protest does not take on these dimensions for the Flamingos, although we needed them both to ignite the popular reaction and to stand as a symbol of unity. It is a reaction to the continuous corruption scandals, to the flagrant collaboration with organized crime, to money laundering, to oncology, to the hemorrhagic emptying of the country in emigration, to the ANA, to strategic investors, to the greed of petty interests, to the audacity of imposing legislative representation with ordinary, unelected people, to the missing meritocracy, to electoral slavery for a job, to the theater that was destroyed like a bandit in the middle of the night despite the popular will, to the absolute lack of obedience, to the total lack of responsibility before the Albanians, to the audacity of fairy tales with a king that are told by a paid stagehand, and of course to the unparalleled mockery, arrogance and arrogance. All collectively accepted due to the impossibility of a popular, or even individual, reaction.

For this protest to exist as it is today, it took all this effort and it is certainly foreign. This is not because it has a different nationality, but because it is a face of Albania that has not been seen before. Consequently, the narratives that feed the inherited distrust rooted in the Albanian collective psychology push people to believe that behind what appears to be hidden reasons and interests that are alien, but that essentially belong to the known Albanian political landscape. They also belong to the face that we know of Albanian society, described in a post distributed everywhere these days that “a people that destroys swallows’ nests on balconies cannot wake up to a devout morning of
the reed of the famingo that has never seen with his own eyes”. Distrust as our characteristic is an acquired instrument, forged as a result of the need to protect ourselves at all times even from our own kind.

This is how this new, unproven face of Albania of the Flamingo Revolution is contested, through justifications that actually exist in the theories of political science. There is certainly theory and practice of mobilizing the resources necessary to organize and support a protest. There is a need for the most diverse instruments, which are treated by researchers such as McCarthy, Zaldi or others and which a part of public opinion rightly puts forward without having to read any of these, but recognizing its own reality.

Of course, in a protest that gathers thousands of individuals, there are also interest groups among them, but this does not mean that this mobilization is an interest group nor that we have a revisionist conspiracy of the most unbridled theories. We rather accept the pretense that allows us to reveal a tangible purpose than this new face. If only because it cannot be new, because we have not encountered it before.

But, we, the disagreeable ones, agree on the reasons for the existence of collective indignation and not on its embodiment in this daily civic march. However, the matryoshka that contains both the reality on the ground and the theories that have described this reality without yet recognizing it show that this process is long and change cannot be immediate. This is a process with stages where the turning point is not guaranteed just as nothing else is guaranteed to us. People do not take to the streets because they suffer, but because they share a common interpretation of the problem of who is responsible and what the injustices are.

Of course, in these conditions we still lack the element of solution. But, just as this new face of Albania, which surprised civilizations with developed protest cultures in recent days, could not appear without the terrain that
shaped it, even alternatives and solutions need time to appear as immediate.

Albania is not an isolated case, we can easily compare it to Hungary, the hegemony of Viktor Orban's power and his courtiers, which had spread its tentacles to every power, with no possible alternative. But, when the alternative appeared, Peter Magyar won in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago because the terrain was ready to welcome him.

The lack of a direct alternative today does not mean that this protest is futile, on the contrary, this protest is what turns the page of the new Albania. It is no longer the “New Beginning” that Rama of another era shouted when he was still shy in public expression. It is the proof that there are thousands of us who think the same way about our circumstances, thousands of votes awaiting the alternatives of the Albania that belongs to us, of a normal country, of the Albania that we want to build ourselves, of the acceptance that the end has come for an entire generation of politicians who grew up in an Albania that no longer exists and who transformed it themselves into what we contest today. They were the product of a system that left them irreparable scars, they were then the product of the chaos of the transition jungle directly under the clutches of a regime that imposed everything on them and were later prey to the gluttony in the Albania of informality where everything was possible. Today they are in their last chapter.

An end that we do not know today how long it will last, but an end nonetheless. This end meets today with our beginning, a beginning that has the contested face of everything foreign and unknown, the face of the Flamingo Revolution.