From The Brooklyn Rail
Since May 2026, I and thousands of other protesters in Tirana have taken to the streets. What began as a protest against elite tourism in the protected coastal area of Vjosa-Narta, near Vlorë in southern Albania, has become an anti-establishment movement of a size and scope unprecedented since the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1991.
The Flamingo Revolution, named after the flamingos which nest in the area’s rich wetland, started as a protest against Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s intentions to turn Sazan, Albania’s only island, and the Narta Lagoon which surrounds it, into a €1.4 billion resort. Since then, the movement has evolved into an expansive mobilization against government corruption.
Unequivocally, we ask for the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. More than a decade of governmental neglect—from the state of public health services and unreliable access to electricity and running water to money laundering and bribery—has been exacerbated by the hyperacceleration of tourism, which has made the coastline increasingly inaccessible to citizens. These conditions fuel our commitment to taking to the streets, night after night.
In a nation so small and late to the modern world, language and land are inextricably entwined. Indeed, land is often the first surface onto which sociopolitical ideology is inscribed. From the delineation of borders to political slogans spelled out with rocks on hills and mountainsides, to those scrawled in alleyways, marking land has a long history here. The 750,000 concrete bunkers built during the dictatorship still stud the Albanian landscape, recording onto the very topography an historical experience that remains somewhere between past and present.
The government, in contrast, desires to designify the landscape, to forget (or, more accurately, to forcibly eliminate from memory) its meanings in order to profit from it.
Ami Xherro is a poet born in Tirana and based in Toronto, and a co-founder of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective. Her books include ‘Drank, Recruited’ (Guernica Editions, 2023).
More content from this blog
- Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, by Moshe Behar – December 2019
- Five Years of Coup: Burmese Anarchists within and without the Revolution (Htet Khine Soe interviewed by Ban Ge, CrimethInc.) – 10 February 2026
- SHARPE Festival Is Holding Firm in Slovakia’s Culture War, by John Bell – 19 August 2025
- The Jargon of Decoloniality, by Neil Larsen – September 2022
- Icons and Guns: Inside Russia’s Largest Far-Right Group, by Giovanni Pigni – 5 August 2025
Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.