The young people in protest, with their simple and knife-sharp slogans, are giving us lessons in citizenship, dignity, and hope. History doesn't just need historians. History needs people who remember.

One of those slogans struck me. It read: “Ismail Qemal Vlora – The Founder. Edi Rama – Ismail Qemal’s version in Temu.” Albanian youth are saying the essence in two lines. Imitation without substance, copy without quality. There is no more accurate metaphor.

There is an Albania that was founded as an ideal. There is another Albania that is governed by a script. The distance between them is not measured in years, but in character.

Ismail Qemal Vlora did not come to Vlora to make a career. He came to close a debt to history. He was old, he was tired, he had more enemies than friends. But he also had something that is noticeably missing from the Albanian scene today. A clear understanding of the fact that power is not ownership, it is responsibility.

Ismail Qemali raised the flag, laid the foundations, and left. Without a golden pension, without a cult of personality, without cameras following him step by step, without a podcast of "the pskik stream".

Edi Rama has been in government for 13 years. 28 in power. He paints. Philosophizes. He mocks. Meanwhile, the state is degrading.

He gives interviews in Paris, Berlin and Washington. He talks about vision, about Europe, about the future. Meanwhile, part of the justice system remains under siege and the media works under the shadow of fear. Public money is wasted on tenders that no one asks about. Protests by citizens, ordinary citizens, not hooligans, are attacked with pepper spray and institutional indifference.

The difference between these two figures is not aesthetic. The difference is existential.

One understood the state as a goal. The other treats it as a tool. A tool for image, a tool for power, a tool to survive election after election with the same rhetoric.

One built. The other communicates that he builds. The difference between construction and the spectacle of construction is precisely the difference between the state and its facade.

Today's Albania has a facade. It has the new boulevard and the tall buildings. It has the European uniform and the international speeches. But it also has courts that do not function, institutions that obey a single voice and an opposition that disappoints. This is not the Albania of Ismail Qemal Vlora. It is its caricature.

A society that forgets its founder and tolerates its ruler doesn't have a leadership problem. It has a self-esteem problem.

Albanians did not sacrifice their blood for a state where the citizen feels powerless in the face of power. This is not the Albania that Ismail Qemal Vlora and Gjergj Kastriot Skanderbeg dreamed of. They built an ideal of freedom, dignity and public responsibility. Today we are far from that ideal.

The missing monument to Ismail Qemali in Tirana is not stone or bronze. The missing museum in Vlora and Tirana is not an artifact. It is our collective conscience, slowly eroding. Too slowly, precisely so that we do not notice it. The conscience that does not notice its own erosion is the conscience that deserves it. Today's civic awakening has revived hope for the New Albania, which must be reborn.