By Ben Andoni
Property remains the mountain that neither the self-proclaimed strategists of today, who identify with the Flamingos movement, nor their adversaries in the Albanian government have been able to climb. Yet, for days now, both real and virtual Albania have witnessed the emergence of a large group articulating, eloquently and idealistically, a vision for the Albania of tomorrow. Still, no one seems capable of confronting the country’s greatest problem—not only the one inherited from the post-1990 transition, but also the unresolved legacy of the post-Second World War era and even the period following independence itself.
Property.
Not merely as an issue affecting its countless victims—those it has claimed and those it may yet claim—but as the central source of the devastation that has accompanied nearly every phase of the Albanian state’s existence. It is not that Albanian bureaucracies have failed to produce laws. Rather, the lack of commitment—if such a euphemism is even appropriate, instead of calling it by its true name: plunder and deception—to enforce them has been enormous, driven largely by Albanians themselves. Alongside the interests of various groups and local power networks, an entire procession of disgraceful bureaucrats has faithfully served this dysfunction.
In the case of the Flamingos protest, the situation in Zvërnec exposed the full complexity of property disputes in one area of southern Albania. But if one were to consider the country as a whole, the scale of the problem becomes almost impossible for any single protest to encompass. Add to this the unimaginable chaos surrounding Albania’s cadastre since the 1990s, and it becomes clear why this fundamental issue remains beyond the reach of the democratic structures the Flamingos aspire to build. Or, more precisely, they simply do not know how to address it.
Nor should they necessarily be blamed for that. The reason is straightforward. As the scholar Hernando de Soto argues in his influential study on capital—translated into Albanian as well—non-Western nations struggle to establish integrated property systems, particularly those emerging from communist regimes. This is even more true for countries like Albania, where the post-war agrarian reform stripped private ownership almost entirely from society.
Even in the early days of the Flamingos movement, some individuals attempted to raise the alarm that behind the environmental destruction lay something even more fundamental: the systematic seizure of public and private coastal property to benefit oligarchs and foreign investors. Yet this argument gained little traction. Deep down, Albanians know that nothing truly resolves the issue of property rights in Albania.
The Flamingos, conceived as an environmental protest, simply cannot confront the reality before which Prime Minister Edi Rama and his political opponents alike have surrendered: the property question. By inertia alone, one could point to the thousands of lives already lost over property disputes, and, given a weak, delayed, and often denied justice system, many more could tragically follow. Add to this the forgers, the fraudulent land titles, and the institutional havoc, and it becomes evident that property—the country’s most fundamental problem—still has no real solution.
Prime Minister Rama himself acknowledged as much only weeks ago, describing it as one of the most difficult challenges his government has faced. Speaking about the networks built upon fraudulent property titles, he admitted:
“What happened to the archives in 1990 was a true catastrophe. We inherited yet another layer of ownership—the layer of falsified property titles. Untangling this is a real challenge, involving extremely difficult and painful compromises.”
He made these remarks during the regional conference in Tirana on digital transformation and legal security of property rights.
In short, property rights—the very foundation upon which legal certainty begins and the capital that fuels capitalist development is built—have not merely left Albania standing still. They have held the country back and, above all, have been actively undermined. More accurately, they have gripped Albania by the throat.
This is the challenge that Rama has failed to overcome after thirteen years in power. Meanwhile, the Flamingos seem to treat it as an exotic by-product of the broader devastation—something they neither approach nor genuinely address. And their virtual campaign against businesses has already backfired spectacularly.
On a broader level, the deadlock surrounding the Law on Protected Areas exposed this reality better than anything else.
If you’d like, I can also make it read more like an editorial in The Guardian, The New York Times, or Foreign Policy while preserving Ben Andoni’s distinctive style.