Why are the remaining flamingos spoiling the concerts?

By Ylli Pata

The incident in “Skanderbeg” Square, where the flamingos tried to spoil a concert in “Skanderbeg” Square, failed to become a main media headline, even though that was not the political aim.

Public debate in Albania, across the great majority of television media, and the other media too, has for years now had only two faces: How Edi Rama is to be toppled, and on the other side how Sali Berisha is to leave.

The arguments, events and developments, although they are supposed to be addressed in public debate, in fact have only spin from one side and the other.

This has made this debate very stale, one that fits in the full sense of the word the portraits of the media prosecutors of the panels.

What is missing is a political voice, an analytical voice in a discussion, where merely heralding the next arrests is not enough. Because arrests, in a state with an independent judiciary, will happen continuously. The argument of political Prime Time should be political, but in most television media it is not.

In this calcified media environment, events are engineered even when they do not happen, the most typical example being “Babalja” — though it is not the only one.

Meanwhile, The Flamingo Revolution in Tirana belongs to those major events whose creation came from high-level laboratories of world politics.

The basic objective of the Flamingo Revolution was not to topple Edi Rama, although that was accepted as collateral effect. It was the cancellation of the Zvërnec and Sazan investment. Because precisely that act would have turned a political movement into a result.

Edi Rama, for his part, turned his position into a political battle, denying and refusing the rejection of the project. In a word: As long as I am here, the project will not be toppled. So the flamingo phase raised the stakes with a blitzkrieg to achieve the paralysis of the government and the majority, through factors and actors close to it and within the state as well.

The lightning attack did not achieve its aim, and we now have a flamingo movement which, although small, is heterogeneous.

Unable to turn into a political verb, into a real movement with popular support, the flamingos use urban guerrilla tactics to spoil the normality of a vibrant city like Tirana.

A reality that changes every day, a geopolitics that has been overturned, but which nobody manages to see. Although it is the duty of politics to enter the heart of people’s lives to hear their problems and concerns.

The flamingos, and their colleagues too, have turned into lazy reporters, who make their stroll in search of an interesting story from Hotel Tirana to Hotel Rogner. So stories that have no connection with reality end up in the newspaper.

When in fact Tirana is undergoing a stunning change, which foreign bloggers who look mainly at tourism report better than those whose job it is — the politicians and the journalists.

The attacks on Erion Braçe, where it is clear why they are made, cannot harm a professional politician, but only the aspirants who seek to grow by giving prominence to a rival. Ilir Alimehmeti, who has declared himself the opposition’s candidate, in a television interview dealt with rivals who, he said, did not worry him. But the reality of a real metropolis that Albania has today — nobody in this cosmos knows it or touches it. A reality that today is not only vibrant, but cosmopolitan and international.

Where in politics too, the centres of gravity weigh on areas and populations that nobody reports on.