Albanians teach Europe a lesson in self-respect

“That’s how we found it. We swam to the island, climbed to the top barefoot and were completely enchanted. Over many years, we developed the ability to help realize its potential.”

If the woman who talks about her desire to improve a foreign island had stepped off a smuggler's boat, her dream would have been crushed in one of the migrant detention centers that the Albanian government recently built in cooperation with Italy. But the ship in question was a multimillion-dollar yacht, and the woman who climbed to the top barefoot was Ivanka Trump. To make the dream come true, all she had to do was call the country's Prime Minister, Edi Rama, and enlist her husband, Jared Kushner, and one of his companies to turn the wildlife sanctuary into luxury real estate.

The Albanian government insists that no deal has been finalized. But it has not hidden its enthusiasm. Who could blame it? After decades of transition from communism to capitalism and protracted negotiations to join the European Union, Albania has lost more than 1,2 million of its citizens to migration. Production levels are low, the agricultural sector is in dire need of modernization, and the higher education sector has been in crisis since the privatization of universities in the 1990s. With no industrial, financial, or human capital to offer on the global market, the only thing it has left to sell is nature. Even tourism, which has been on the rise in recent years, has required a concerted government campaign to improve the country’s image.

Sustainable development and environmental protection are easy to advocate, but expensive and difficult to implement. In a competitive global environment, real estate and luxury tourism generate faster growth, even as they increase inequality and deplete natural resources. The models on offer are the same ones that richer countries tried 30 years ago and now regret.

Far from regressive nationalism or nostalgia, the movement's sole rallying cry, "Albania is not for sale," reflects something the socialist government has forgotten: that self-respect is a prerequisite for others to respect you, and that a people willing to sell their souls for investment will eventually realize that their souls were the only valuable thing they had.

Albanians are aware that property speculation without state support means that ordinary citizens will struggle to buy a flat or pay rent. They know that luxury tourism means that holidays in their own country are becoming the privilege of a few. With no trade unions worth mentioning and a labour movement that only appears in archive footage of communist-era May Day parades, working conditions are so exploitative that only people from even more desperate countries are willing to take the jobs that open up. Albanians simply pack up and leave for other countries, where they are greeted with insults and xenophobia. They keep their heads down, knowing that this is the price they are paying for their children’s future.

In May 2025, the ruling Socialist Party won the elections for the fourth time. The turnout of around 44 percent was historically low, despite the fact that the right to vote was extended to Albanians from the diaspora for the first time. There was no election manifesto, nor a principled debate with the opposition, whose leader Sali Berisha was mostly depicted as an owl on government social media. In a country where more than 90 percent of citizens support European integration, it was enough to plaster billboards with photos of European passports and persistently repeat one date: membership by 2030.

This is the other side of European integration: criticism of the authorities becomes opposition to Europe itself. The choice is not between opposing visions of society, but only between different managers in the same inevitable direction. When politics is reduced to technocratic governance, the only prism through which political conflict is interpreted is “corruption”: as if post-communist societies carry it in their blood, as if the problem is individual transgressions, not the rules themselves.

For years, Albanians have accepted it with the same fatalism with which one accepts a natural disaster. Now, young people are resisting it. The current protests are over a recently passed law on strategic investments, which entrenches oligarchic capture of the state. The protests escalated when heavy machinery entered a protected coastal wetland, and a viral video showed private security guards beating a protester while state police stood by.

A generation taught to think that the only questions are how quickly to build infrastructure for tourism, how quickly to integrate into the EU, and how efficiently to attract investment, is now asking: does it really have to be that way? Does democracy have to mean the rule of a handful of super-rich?

It is an inspiring example of civic activism the likes of which I have not seen since the fall of communism, and its international visibility is undoubtedly helped by the media attention the Trump family is attracting. But the question is, why now? The opposition has tried in vain for years to mobilize the public against, well, “corruption.” Fires have been lit in parliament and Molotov cocktails have been thrown at government buildings. But in the case of Kushner, the opposition is on the same side as the government. Perhaps that is what allowed thousands of young people to flood the streets: the certainty that disobedience will not be appropriated. It is touching to watch them sing, dance, clean the streets after the protests and give flowers to the police. Unlike the old opposition, they are not giving up on the state, but insisting that it belongs to them.

In recent years, the response to political disenfranchisement in post-communist Europe has been the rise of xenophobic movements. Only the far right has benefited from the protests against the system. The Albanian case shows that a different kind of mobilization is possible. Far from regressive nationalism or nostalgia, the movement’s single cry, “Albania is not for sale,” reflects something that the socialist government has forgotten: that self-respect is a prerequisite for being respected by others, and that a people willing to sell their souls for investment will eventually realize that their souls were the only valuable thing they had.

There is something admirable, yet fragile, about a movement without a leader, without a program, and without the infrastructure to sustain it in the long term. Leaderless movements are harder to bring under political control, but easier to infiltrate and disperse. To be effective, they must move from resistance to proposing solutions, finding the political unity that has been suppressed by rallying around a single cause.

Yet as long as democratic politics is captured in the hands of a few wealthy individuals, politicians come and go, anti-corruption trials satisfy the need for punishment, and civic activism creates the illusion of change. One by one, societies find themselves caught in the same paradoxes of capitalist development. The challenge is not just how to replace individuals, but how to build a new system.

Yet this time Albania does not have to catch up with Europe – it can lead it. Generations ready to mobilize for an alternative model of development, one that rejects oligarchic capture and links environmental protection with democratic legitimacy, are not to be feared, but celebrated. Instead of becoming “like the rest of Europe,” as the old slogan went, Albania could teach the old continent a lesson in self-respect.

The author is a professor of political history and philosophy at the London School of Economics.

The text is taken from The Guardian.

Translation: NB