Why the meme protest ended in a coffin

Many government officials have criticised the use of a coffin as a symbol during the protest. Inevitably, it recalled September 14, 1998, when the coffin was not empty. It carried the body of Azem Hajdari, the leader of Albania’s December Movement.

At the time, the coffin was used in a macabre political spectacle, meant to send a message to those in power: that Hajdari could still threaten them, even in death.

If the people behind this new display had that moment in mind — and they appear to come from the same political tradition — then they did not misread the symbol. They simply repeated it.

In 1998, the coffin carried the body of the man who had helped lead the student movement that brought down Albania’s communist regime. This time, what was placed in the coffin was something else: the idea of a peaceful protest itself, along with the pelican memes, the drums, and the jokes aimed at the government and Prime Minister Edi Rama.

This protest has no Azem Hajdari. So its many would-be leaders placed the remains of its peaceful image in a coffin and marched with it.

That is not something the government needs to overdramatise, even if the peaceful phase of the protest is now over. Nor is there much point lamenting the turn to violence. In the 36 years since the December Movement, most major protests in Albania have involved violence. This one looked as if it might be different. It was not.

The reason is clear.

Look at the people pushing the violence. Look at those presenting themselves as leaders, and those acting like street enforcers. Look at those attacking police stations, smashing police vehicles, or targeting public figures, journalists, artists and anyone else who refuses to line up behind them. They are plainly members and militants of the Democratic Party.

There should be no illusion that this is still a protest led by civil society, or by the young women with memes and drums. Many of those coming from the diaspora are also Democratic Party people. The violent WhatsApp groups are largely filled with party-linked activists, and Democratic Party figures are helping steer them.

This protest now belongs to the Democratic Party.

The smaller groups chanting “Berisha to prison” are mostly militants from three minor parties. Because they have acted as public faces of the protest, they would like to turn it into their own political capital. But the protest is no longer theirs. It belongs to those who have been protesting in the same way for 35 years.

It is unfair to take the protest away from them and dress it up as a civic movement. These are their people directing the violence. Not necessarily because they want violence for its own sake, but because this is the only political language they know.

So there is no need to keep lecturing them about the coffin. For them, that coffin is not a source of embarrassment. It is the symbol of the most power they ever showed in the street. The one time they managed to take over the prime minister’s office, even if only for a few hours, they did it with a coffin.

As for those who began this protest with memes, many of them do not even understand what the coffin represents. They do not know why it carries such weight in Albania’s political memory, because they were born after those events had already happened.

The coffin has stripped the protest of its civic disguise. It has pushed aside the memes, the drums and the language of non-partisan anger. It has returned the protest to Sali Berisha’s opposition.

That is where the coffin belongs politically.

All the other theatrical manoeuvres — the talk of a national assembly, the fantasy of creating a parallel state — are Berisha’s way of ridiculing the protest before claiming it for himself. In the end, he will tell them what he told those he sent with a coffin to the prime minister’s office in 1998:

You are Fatos Nano’s agents.

I am the opposition.

Originally published in Albanian as: Pse fantazia e memeve përfundoi në arkivol?