The “flamingos” are Berisha’s unwanted political children

The whole degradation of the so-called “Flamingo revolution” is the result of what a long-standing model of opposition politics can pass on to the next generation when it is built on violent protest theatre, sporadic anti-system gestures and the language of public lynching.

We are now facing a generation that has spent 13 years watching that model and has drawn one conclusion: it failed only because it was not violent enough.

That is why the “flamingos” have become a movement that wants to do politics by non-political means.

They want everyone on their side, while attacking and threatening everyone around them.

They speak of a new system as if it were a new lottery — not produced by elections, but by drawing lots. It is supposedly pro-European and pro-American, while also standing against the whole world, which, in turn, is expected to support them.

The “flamingos” are against the official opposition, but also demand that the official opposition stand with them and relinquish its mandates, even though that same act is one of the reasons the opposition is in this state today.

Their lynching language, their calls for the death and murder of every public figure who disagrees with them, their public intimidation and all their other thuggish acts are the banal consequence of what an entire generation has grown up hearing from Berisha’s opposition.

For that opposition, this has been its everyday language.

The contradiction is that Berisha’s opposition was, and remains, the official opposition, while behaving as if it stood outside the system.

At the centre of its politics has always been the language of threats and public lynching.

Berisha’s raised finger against his enemies, his threats to destroy his opponents, his hymns to violence, his treatment of threats against opponents as a normal democratic standard, the relinquishment  of parliamentary mandates and the boycott of elections — all of this has raised a generation that sees these things as normal.

And that generation now blames Berisha only for not making those threats real.

So they are trapped inside the historical misunderstanding created by a fraud who acted like an anti-system opposition leader while being not only inside the system, but also one of its beneficiaries.

Now they think Berisha simply lacked the courage to step outside the system, and that they will solve that problem themselves.

You could see it today in the way they demanded explanations from opposition MPs.Why are you not relinquishing your mandates? Why are you participating in the elections? Why are you going to parliament?

Listening to that nonsense, you realise they genuinely believe the relinquishment of mandates and the election boycott were brilliant ideas, and that the opposition should repeat them.

In reality, the current misery of the opposition, and to some extent of democracy in Albania, is the result of that irresponsible act, which shrank the opposition and made it irrelevant.

After 13 years in opposition, the Albanian opposition no longer has a real presence in local government. It is suffering from a shortage of people who should have been trained as municipal administrators and local leaders.

Instead, an entire generation has grown up in the streets with the idea that power can be taken by force, with Molotov cocktails, conspiracy theories, plots against Soros, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Israel and every other madness.

The revolutionaries you now see in the streets are the product of Berisha’s opposition model and of its split identity: official opposition on one side, anti-system opposition on the other.

That split has not produced people capable of overcoming it.

It has produced its idiots — people who believe the opposition was right precisely in all the things it did wrong.

That is why it is so natural for Democratic Party political leaders to move into the leadership of this protest and take full control of it.

Now that the protest has entered the spiral of violence, it is only natural that control should pass to those who own political violence in Albania.

But the “Flamingo” revolutionaries clearly believed Berisha not as the actor he is, but as a man who was right in what he said and wrong only in what he failed to do.

They have gone into the street with the idea that they will do what Berisha promised but never managed to do.

In other words, they will kill, beat and overturn Albania through violence and a parallel political system.

That is why they look like Berisha’s unwanted political children, born from his fake relationship with the opposition public.

They have taken the shape of the lies Berisha told in order to look like an opposition leader.

Originally published in Albanian as: “Flamingot” si fëmijë politikisht të padëshiruar të Berishës