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In Albania, everyone has a reason to protest.

2025-12-28 08:45:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

In Albania, anyone you ask on the street will give you at least one reason to protest.

Some will start from their pockets, some from injustice, some from government corruption, some from fatigue, some from lack of hope.

Doctors will protest for healthcare. Officials that they no longer take bribes. Pensioners "protest" at the pharmacy when they take cheap drugs that have no effect and at the neighborhood store when they write their name on the list. Young people protest silently by leaving. Students for the destroyed education. Teachers that they deal with everything bureaucratic and not just teaching.

Parents protest why schools don't keep their children in classrooms 24 hours a day so they can comfortably work or go to coffee shops.

Citizens complain about high prices; merchants because they want more profits. The poor because they are poor; the rich because they are not even richer.

Why is the opposition not in power? Why doesn't the position have more power?

Why is the leader of the opposition not the prime minister? Even the prime minister himself has reason to protest against those who ate plums, figs and pears "behind his back".

Yes. In Albania everyone has a reason to protest. Some have ten.

No one is left without a reason to participate in a protest.

A healthy society protests. Protest is a sign of life and responsibility, not chaos. Where people take to the streets to oppose injustice, arbitrary power, poverty or lack of dignity, there society still breathes.

But here begins the Albanian paradox.
The streets are rarely filled with society.

The citizen knows that as soon as he goes out into the street, someone will put the flag in his hand, the slogan in his mouth, and the party seal on his forehead. And he refuses. Not because he doesn't suffer, but because he refuses to serve as decoration.

Albanians already know that protests in Albania are not an expression of a responsible and active society; they are a test of strength between parties, a test of parties in crisis, not of a smart society. They are rallies that do not arise from below, but are called from above; they do not erupt from civic revolt, but are organized by the headquarters offices.

You go out to protest about prices, poverty and end up cheering for the mayor. You go out for the injustice that has grabbed you by the throat and you are lined up behind the party flag. You go out as a citizen and you turn into a militant, without even realizing it; today you cheer, tomorrow you are forgotten, the day after tomorrow you are used against yourself.

And the protest is no longer civic. It's theirs. Of the structures, of the lists, of the cameras, of the scripts written the night before.

Therefore, society, even when wounded, does not come out to play the role of an extra in someone else's scenario.

This is why protests with partisan colors, partisan flags, recycled speeches, and worn-out faces fail to test the health of society.

They cease to be protests and turn into a show for the cameras, a test of strength within the party and not an act of pressure on the government, because they represent no one except their organizers.

A healthy society protests for causes, not for seats. For principles, not for names. For justice, not for political bargaining or the rotation of actors within the current system.

In Albania, everyone has a reason to protest, but no one has a reason to believe in the protest.

And until protests are freed from partisan capture and become a civic voice, they will not demonstrate social support, but only the fatigue of a formal democracy. This is the clearest sign that the problem is not a lack of protest, but a lack of belief that protest, as it is offered today, is still worth something.

And without the conviction that protest is civic, every call for a demonstration remains empty, no matter how just the cause.

And the dream of every government is a people who protest only in their minds. /CNA