If the protest does not find its voice, others will speak for it

For a week now — today marks seven full days — Albania has been witnessing a rare moment: politics breaking free from the usual forces that have controlled it for three decades.

That has happened because of the wave of protests in defence of “Zvërnec”, which seem to have shaken a large part of society out of its numbness. Symbolically, they began against a barbed-wire fence around the area where a luxury resort is said to be planned — a project publicly associated, because of the weight of their names, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

The first fence was removed. But the problem was never just the sudden appearance of that fence.

Zvërnec simply made visible, for a brief moment, the many fences that divide Albanian society.

They divide those who experience the state as an obstacle they must constantly find ways around, from those for whom the state clears the path. They divide those who are fined for trying to repair the roof of their own house from those who are granted legal shortcuts to transform vast stretches of coastline.

For a few moments, Zvërnec gave those invisible fences a physical form.

That is why the protests have been so powerful so far. They have brought together people who do not necessarily share the same political beliefs, including many who have never cared about politics at all. This much-criticised mixture is exactly what has protected the protest from being captured by one political party or another.

But the same broadness is also a risk.

A wide base of participants, however inspiring, does not guarantee that the protest will keep its political meaning. It may gather tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people and still fail to name the cause it is fighting for.

The patriotic slogans, which have been everywhere in these first days, have their place. They help bring people out of their homes, or get them “up from cafés ”. They also remind the government that people still care about the land under their feet.

But patriotism is also the easiest thing to empty of meaning. It can be used by anyone: by fans in a stadium when the national team is playing, and by politicians who vote for laws that privatise the coastline. Neither has to mean it seriously.

That is why the protest now faces a serious question: can it find its own political voice before others start speaking in its name?

Over this week, we have seen its strength, its energy and its impressive ability to bring together people who are irritated even by the idea of breathing the same air. That is real force. But numbers alone do not protect a protest from being hollowed out politically.

The claim that the protest should not be political is one of the great paradoxes of Albania’s transition. For many Albanians, the word “politics” can sometimes sound more frightening than the word “cancer”, because they see politics only in parties and not in ideas.

But every issue this protest has raised is already political.

The violence of private security forces is political. The treatment of public land and public assets as investment material is political. Even the insistence on keeping the protest “non-political”, in order to keep it clean, is itself political — and often more dangerous. In trying to escape politics, the protest risks losing its meaning.

That is why the main question now is whether the protest can find its own political voice.

That voice is not a threat to the protest. On the contrary, without it, the protest risks being captured by old politics.

The parties and figures that have degraded public life in Albania for three decades may reappear as the supposedly legitimate owners of public anger. The attempts have already begun, especially from Berisha’s Democratic Party, which first attacked the protest and now appears to be slowly changing course.

If the protest does not clearly define its own cause, others will define it for them.

But there is an even greater danger: that the protest becomes ridiculous before it becomes politically effective.

Attempts to do that began early and have been intense. And the protesters have not made the government’s propaganda machine work very hard, especially when conspiracy theorists and public figures already mocked by society are allowed to grab the microphone — people whose theatrics travel easily through the media.

There is also a sense of insecurity that risks making the protest look as if it is being shaped by the government itself. This comes from the effort of groups inside the protest to clear their name after every label the prime minister throws at them.

When he calls the protesters manipulated by Greece and they appear the next day with slogans against Fredi Beleri, it may look like self-defence. In reality, they are stepping into the frame he has built for them.

The same happens when he calls them Marxists and, 24 hours later, they chant “Down with communism.”

A serious protest cannot allow the man it is protesting against to write its slogans, even indirectly. It must insist on what it is, not spend every day proving what it is not.

And at its core, this is a protest against the capture of public wealth by private interests.

It has already disturbed the government’s neat story by making the project politically costly.

Now it must protect itself from becoming nothing more than beautiful noise.