Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

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By Aris Roussinos

Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

Aris Roussinos visited the fraught country at the height of what is now being called the Flamingo Revolution, speaking to activists, opposition leaders, and even the country’s embattled PM himself — who believes that his people have never had it so good. 

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“Why am I living in England?” Avni, an Albanian in his 40s working in London as a builder, asked me angrily, as we walked to the lines of riot police separating Albania’s Flamingo Revolution protesters from the country’s parliament. “Albania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn’t be immigrants. We should come back home,” he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now entirely depopulated, as everyone who could had already decamped to Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

“Because the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn’t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you’ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they’ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It’s a really, really corrupted government, and we’ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.”

It was the 54th and most violent day so far of the street protests that have overshadowed Albania’s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. “Everyone thinks that this is a democratic state,” Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting “Down with communism!” and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. “It is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.” Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania’s parliament. Protestors had hurled eggs and water bottles at police lines, and at the cars of politicians making their way to the voting chamber. When the police pushed them back with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, the protestors howled in fury, some breaking aloe leaves from the decorative street planting and squeezing the soothing juice into their eyes. “Dictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say ‘fuck you’, because that’s not how you change the country,” Bora told me. “I advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they’re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.”

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zvërnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on a luxury resort project backed by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama’s government. In violent scenes, security guards and villagers clashed, before local protesters broke down the fencing and reclaimed possession of what they say is their land. Who the land in question actually belongs to remains a matter of dispute. Because of the many land reforms and disbursements marking the country’s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime to the chaotic transition to democracy, claims in Albania often overlap. Frequently, more than one party can claim legal title to any given plot.

The ostensible owner of the Zvërnec coastline at the center of the Kushner project, a Miami-based businessman called Artur Shehu, has been accused by lawyers working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was also announced to be under investigation by SPAK, an anti-corruption body set up by Rama’s government, for money laundering and international cocaine trafficking. Shehu, for his part, denies any wrongdoing, insisting he is a legitimate businessman who inherited the land from his medieval forebears. Complicating the story are hints, in SPAK proceedings, of government officials’ attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that “these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities”.
At the same time, SPAK stresses that “at this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities”. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania, filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party to claim high-level political corruption.

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Because the salt lagoon at Zvërnec is a rare European breeding ground for flamingos, the initial protests in Tirana were environmental ones, with festive protesters carrying giant styrofoam flamingos as their emblem. But over the course of the following weeks, the protests escalated from halting construction on the project and reinstating Albania’s recently quashed environmental protection laws, to demanding what is in effect a full revolution against the entire political system. The protesters now insist that Rama must resign and face trial for corruption, along with the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha, while Albania must install a 12-month technocratic government before new elections. Naturally, Rama is not inclined to agree, hence the current standoff.

Though the nightly protests along Tirana’s leafy boulevards are good-natured family affairs, those in the morning are rowdier, bringing along a more committed core of activists who declare themselves to be revolutionaries. While there are young masked men to be seen throwing missiles, and older working-class men wearing the traditional Albanian felt cap or waving the flag of Greater Albania, the majority are from the young, highly-educated and socially liberal Tirana bourgeoisie, as well as the diaspora — ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama’s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting “Rama, hand in your resignation,” in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, or “Rama, Rama, Fuck You,” to the tune of “We Will Rock You”.

Over the days and nights of protests I attended, long and passionate speeches condemned the government as terrorists, as a dictatorship, and bemoaned the claimed sell-out of Albanian land to Israeli interests. The latter, rather conspiratorial, claim transpired to be a regular theme when talking to Albanians. Even stickers observed on lampposts in central Tirana depicted Rama as a stooge of George Soros or as a Hasidic Jew. Xhoana, a fashionably dressed marketing executive, told me: “Our government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don’t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.”

“Albania right now doesn’t need a revolution,” said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. “People have been saying for 50 days we need a revolution, but they have no plan for what comes next. A revolution at this stage, when we are so close to going into the EU, is a dangerous thing.” Rama’s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by rule of law concerns, the country’s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime — particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc’s agency in the new age of geopolitical competition. But the window for accession may be narrow and short-lived. For both the ruling Socialist Party and the EU, this summer’s mass protests are an unwanted complication.

“Europe, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,” Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. “They didn’t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.” A skeptic of Albania’s progress under Rama’s government, which he termed a “narco-state,” ruled by a “klepto-regime”, Pollo told me that “Rama has allowed for the Albanian rings, which bring coke from Latin America to central and northern Europe, to launder their proceeds in construction. And then, I mean, when elections come, they, with their money and their muscle, they help him get the vote.” But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition’s concerns. “Edi Rama is a master in staging things, and organizing, in having summits in Tirana, and having the leaders in some restaurant presenting a pizza, with his face on the pizza box, and then you have the President of the European Commission, saying ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi’.”

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On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn’t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama’s rule, Albania’s GDP has almost tripled in a decade, a growth rate Western Europeans can only envy. New tower blocks, exuberantly designed in the flush of new wealth, loom over Tirana’s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather outré destinations, both Tirana and the country’s many fast-developing beach resorts are now filled with tourists, both northern Europeans seeking summer sun and Turks and Gulf Arabs escaping it. The bustling cafes, bars and restaurants are as stylish and comfortable as anything elsewhere in the Mediterranean, if no longer significantly cheaper. Albanian wages have not kept up with the rapid inflation of prices, particularly of food and property, introduced by the influx of money, legitimate or otherwise. In some ways, Edi Rama appears a victim of his own success.

The protesters are “an urban group of people, predominantly highly educated”, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlorë, including Zvërnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. “The paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we’ve done something right, right?” Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zvërnec ruefully admitted liking. “It’s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We’re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.”

For all the country’s economic success, Albanian political discourse is riven by eyebrow-raising claims of impropriety, emanating most strongly from the opposition. In his office in Democratic Party headquarters, Sali Berisha, the 81-year old leader of the conservative opposition, came out from behind a desk piled high with papers to shake my hand. Behind him, on the cluttered bookshelves, a MAGA baseball cap and framed photograph of Mother Theresa vied for space. Albania’s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country’s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country’s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had lifted the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place — unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being “corrupted” by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country’s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. “If you look to this country,” Berisha asked me rhetorically, “What you will find? You’ll find an extraordinary power in the hands of Edi Rama and his government, which is the power of drugs. The power of drugs is many, many billions of euros. The power of drugs, of Albanian drug cartels, controls everything in this country.”

Recently returned to frontline politics after defeating internal rivals within the Democratic Party, Berisha eyes the protests as a route back to office, or at very least as weakening his bitter rival Rama’s grip on power. He concedes that “maybe 20%” of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by “Left-wing extremist groups”. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, “and their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That’s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.” As for his rival himself, “Edi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,” Berisha told me. “Like being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.”

* * * * *

The Prime Minister’s Office is in a handsome Rationalist building opened in 1941, designed to house the Italian colonial governor. Attendants there ushered me through long corridors, lined with classical Greek and Ottoman ceramics and into Edi Rama’s office, where he pointedly ignored me for some time, busy scrolling on his mobile phone. Rama had been an artist and writer before entering politics as the reformist Mayor of Tirana, whose policy of beautifying the capital had turned it into an Instagrammable tourist destination, and himself into Albania’s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912, surpassed only by the communist dictatorship. A big and powerful-looking man, today dressed all in loose, black clothing, apart from spotless white trainers, the fiercely intelligent Rama is as charismatic as he is intimidating. But recent international interviews had been fraught, making the mood in the office tense. When Rama finally sat down beside me, leaning into his chair, I asked him his opinion of the protests.

“The protests today are not the protests of June, so the people who spoke today are different. They are engaged in political parties. They are engaged in opposition parties, small parties of opposition, Leftists from the extreme and Rightists from the extreme,” he claimed, “While the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.” In any case, “I am very, very proud that we have had such a big protest for days in a most peaceful manner, and that nobody was hurt, nobody was stopped to do what he or she wanted,” he added, “The bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.” Repeating his government’s claim that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that “the algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I’m telling you, one of the things that we have seen from the back of the mirror, the social media, is that a very high percentage of the content is produced outside the building. It’s not Albanian.” Indeed, Rama added, “If this would not have been about Jared Kushner and Trump and Ivanka and all type of fantasies, this would not have been so good for the algorithm,” but the Kushner link “brought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.” When I demurred, he added, “You are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he’s killed flamingos in Albania.”

* * * * *

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zvërnec. “Albania is not a democracy,” an older man told me in the village’s heavily-accented Greek. “They are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,” he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. “We have had no water here for two months. I have to use my little well, but then they take everything we own here for themselves.” A local woman agreed. “They have taken my elderly father’s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won’t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.”

For the birthplace of Albania’s political crisis, Zvërnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlorë, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zvërnec reflects an older, unspoiled Mediterranean, increasingly a nostalgic memory even in Albania. Wading birds hoot and croak in the coastal marshes of the Vjosa delta, cicadas rasp in the olive groves, shaded from the ferocious summer sun: it is all reminiscent of the Greece of maybe 30 or 40 years ago. “We want investment, but not this investment,” one woman told me. “This is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don’t want Israelites here — this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.”

On Zvërnec’s wild sandy beach of Portonovo, empty save for a handful of local families, happily ignoring the notices forbidding them to swim, I met Kosta Xhaho, the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania’s largest environmental NGO. This is, he told me, one of the most important, turtle nesting areas, and Ground Zero for the protests that had long migrated to central Tirana. “We started to protest here. Then we started to fight with those bulldozers that started to construct a road and the trucks in the protected area. And then we started to fight with the security that they put on the fences, and now we are fighting with the government to change the law, so this area is to stay protected forever.”

PPNEA’s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog’s Kingdom of Albania. But it is a highly marketable commodity, just as much for those who have farmed it for generations as for the Kushners. And it is not clear that the villagers themselves wish the site to remain undeveloped, rather than profiting from the tourism boom they believe Shehu has stolen from them. In nearby Vlorë, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. “These people [in Zvërnec] are stupid,” a Vlorë taxi driver told me. “They don’t want to go forward, but it’s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It’ll be so good for our city. I just hope it’s like they say it is, and Israel doesn’t build a base there,” he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests “because they’re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.” I asked him who he voted for. “Rama, of course,” he said, looking at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, “Every time Edi Rama.”

For Rama himself, re-elected just over a year ago for a fourth term, the protests have come as a jolt of shock. In the recently released “Besa” strategic document, whose name alludes to the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama’s government declared that “the flamingo boulevard” presented “a mirror that society held up before us”, and proof that “ever more Albanians, including older ones, no longer compare the Albania we have with the one we had in 2013, but only with the one they themselves believe Albania can and must be”. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville’s observation that the most dangerous moment for any regime is when the rising expectations derived from reforms already undertaken make any residual injustices seem intolerable. “The citizen who has more than yesterday,” the strategy’s authors write, “is a more dissatisfied citizen. Precisely because they live better today than yesterday, they likewise believe that their country is capable of doing far more than it does today.” In a recent open letter, the former Socialist Party insider and Rama loyalist Elisa Spiropali, recently removed from her role as Europe Minister, declared that the protests represent a “political and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.” In what can only be read as a critique of Rama’s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires “not more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals”, “more humility, less arrogance”, “more representation and less concentration of decision-making”, to build “a state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person”.

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali’s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. “This is a very internal, domestic thing,” he said. “And we have to keep it for our own because I don’t think we have to export our internal things outside for the audience, because then it becomes like feeding with curiosity, feeding with curious things, an audience that is not at all inside the story, not informed or nothing.” But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama’s inner circle had attended the Aruba meeting with the alleged drug trafficker Artur Shehu, and that the government had uncomfortable links with organized crime bosses. “Where is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?” he responded. “So how would you answer,” he added, pointing at me, “for example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it’s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it’s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I’m really disgusted from years now that in this country… that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.” Asked about the opposition’s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. “You can say whatever you want. But ‘narco-state’, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn’t match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I’m telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans, to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active in organized crime. Outside. But the industry of the crime is not here. It’s there.”

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, “You know narco-states, I guess, how they feel like, you know corrupt poor countries, how they feel like, you know middle-income countries, how they feel like. I don’t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides… It doesn’t feel unsafe, it doesn’t feel like a poor country, you don’t feel all these things.”

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania’s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. “No, how protests can threaten the legacy?” he said, “I like the pressure.” He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today’s, in 2013, just after entering power, and also in 2018. “When it came to the first one, I pulled back because they were right. They had a very strong point. I said, you are right, we’ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn’t pull back. But I started a conversation with them and we did good things. This time, I learned things, so we are not going to pull back from the [Zvërnec] project, for sure. But we’re gonna make a [consultation] process.” In the end, he added, “I strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.”

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Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia’s strongman Aleksandar Vučić — not, in Albania, a flattering comparison — who has also won the EU’s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama’s children. For nearly a generation, Rama’s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zvërnec, Tirana’s middle classes feel poorer, not richer, for the visible growth and wealth sprouting around them. For Western observers, now accustomed to stagnant wages and the limitations of two-party systems, Albania’s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU’s Balkan waiting-room.

With the protests continuing, contrary to early expectations, through August, the likelihood of their escalation in the cooler weather of autumn, when holidaymakers have returned home and students have returned to classes, appears to be growing. But juggling his attempts to secure the simultaneous approval of EU observers, of the mercurial and acquisitive Trump administration, of the party shaped in his own image and of his increasingly restive voters, Rama projected only calmness. Leaning back into his armchair at the end of our meeting, he told me, “Listen, I am 13 years here now. So I have three more years. I have nothing to prove to myself. Because in the beginning, you know, there are many things to prove to yourself. As you said, I have my place in the history of this country, then, in which light this will be decided by the people.”

But navigating the vagaries of the second Trump administration has increased the pressure on Edi Rama, whose attempts to court favor with the American president, whether by signing up Albania to Trump’s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family’s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama’s only reward, so far, has been Washington’s sudden rehabilitation of his bitterest political rival, Sali Berisha, in what can only be read as a means to exert American pressure. What happens over autumn will now decide everything, Sali Berisha told me. “Very much will depend on September. Will they re-energize, remobilize? Will opposition parties succeed to get united in a large front? To persist for a caretaker government for new elections, or not, I could not predict. It’s difficult, but I think it’s vital.” But the Democratic Party’s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha’s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. “Revolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,” it said, Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana’s streets.

I am, therefore, probably not the ideal candidate for Dua Lipa’s podcast venture At Your Service, nor her accompanying free newsletter Service 95 — both given glowing profiles in the Sunday Times last weekend. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, French philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were fond of saying that an understanding of an author’s biography or intentions are largely irrelevant to artistic appreciation. This may be patent nonsense when it comes to novels, but it surely works for pop songs — probably because they aren’t art at all and were never supposed to be.

I don’t care about the actual personality of a star, whether she writes her own music, what her inspiration was, whether she is clever or funny, what traumas lie in her past, how extensive her charitable work is, or what her views are on social justice. I may have well-known feminist tendencies, but in pop musical terms I’m more of a commitment-phobe who just wants to be able to enjoy a pleasantly undemanding high from a beautiful female for three minutes without having to listen to her talk afterwards.

Based on these limited requirements, I have loved Lipa for a good while now. Her early hit New Rules is a classic of the kick-him-to-the-curb genre, and the accompanying video tribute to the consolations of sisterhood is stylish and witty as hell. Her most recent album Future Nostalgia is, as the kids say, an absolute banger — full of gratifyingly impersonal dance-pop and electronic, delivered in a smoky, amber voice and with her characteristic blank-faced insolence. She looks like a goddess, and her songs tend to stick to the only things that matter in the world of pop: sex, love, heartache, and picking yourself up again afterwards. In other words, she should be perfect, except that now I’ve listened to five episodes of At Your Service and read several articles from Service 95 and everything is ruined.

For it turns out that, all this time, Lipa — 15th for worldwide listens on Spotify this month — has been leading a double life. Apparently not satisfied with the daily grind of making apocalyptically tasteless outfits look superhot for Instagram, she has also been commissioning articles for her newsletter on the Russian kleptocracy, compiling lists of which art museums to visit in Japan, enthusing about her favourite novels, and learning Spanish so she can discuss the symbolism in Almodóvar films with the director himself. Other podcast guests have included Nobel Peace prize winner Nadia Murad on sexual slavery, Monica Lewinsky on social media influence, Russell Brand on himself, and film-maker Greta Gerwig, who at one point in her interview reads out a lengthy quotation from Joan Didion. In short, Dua Lipa is a very dark horse.

Though these revelations about the star have come as a bit of a shock to me, looking back I now see the signs were there. After all, a song lyric of hers includes the line: “You want a timeless song, I wanna change the game/ Like modern architecture, John Lautner coming your way”.  Indeed, now that I am forced to contemplate Lipa’s actual personality and history, I find the worst of all outcomes: an interesting, fully-dimensional person with a fascinating backstory.

Her family are from Kosovo, and originally Muslim. One of her grandfathers was the Head of the Kosovo Institute of History (improbably pictured here having lunch in the Sixties with the future grandfather of another dazzling British-Albanian pop sensation, Rita Ora). Lipa herself was born in London in 1995 after her parents moved there fleeing the war, but by 2008 and following Kosovan independence they moved back to Albania. Two years later, she returned to London aged 15, living without family, and trying to break into the music business while doing GCSEs (her mother reportedly used to fly over for parent evenings). She left school with four A-levels and a management deal. Personality-wise, she seems clever, grounded, philanthropically-minded, and very well-organised. (At one point on the podcast, she reports that “every part of my day is planned to the minute”.) She also exhibits a strong Albanian nationalist streak, unafraid to wade into the minefield of Balkan politics, and talking proudly of her grandfather’s refusal to rewrite Kosovan history to suit Serbian rulers.

Given her musical talent, supernatural good looks, and the fact she’s only 27, all of this Renaissance Woman stuff would be completely unbearable if perfectly executed. Luckily, though, it has some endearing flaws. On the podcast, Lipa’s vocally-fried Parliament Hill drawl, coupled with her endless positivity and enthusiastic talk of what “inspires” and “speaks to her”, gets a bit much after a while (sample exclamation: “I love Joan Didion!”).  Her newsletter, meanwhile — mostly composed of writing she has commissioned from others — may aspire to be “the ultimate cultural concierge”, but in practice is more like a weird smorgasbord of clashing content and a treasure trove of inadvertent comedy.

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I assume the newsletter’s actual audience must be young Lipa fans the world over. When you subscribe, you get a choice of languages, and there is the odd explanatory aside as if for schoolchildren (for instance: “Until 1991, Russia was ruled by communists; there was almost no private property and everything valuable belonged to the state.”). But otherwise, there is very little attempt to cater to audience expectations. The dominant idiom is that of the blandly judgemental world of luxury women’s magazines, with a distinct whiff of back-of-the-plane-seat travel mag thrown in.

As with women’s magazine writing generally, the main underlying premise seems to be to educate readers about whichever social norms are currently hot. In a po-faced tone, nearly every sentence implicitly tells you what a young girl should think, do, admire, buy, or overcome her presumed prejudices to accept. (“Kodo Nishimura loves makeup, nice clothes, and serving the Buddhist community as a monk at the temple where he grew up”). Lipa does her bit by supplying endless top-five lists: her five favourite skincare products, sex books, vitamins, things to do in Tirana, or “pieces of pop culture presenting norm-defying views on womanhood”.

Predictably, there is quite a lot of American social justice-style guilt-tripping here, much of it blatantly at odds with the specifics of Lipa’s cultural allure in practice. Down with fatphobia, impossible beauty standards, and rape culture; up with wellness, self-care, sex toys made out of ocean-bound plastic, and making the outdoors inclusive for drag queens. Other highlights involve learning how creative designer-types spend their days (“I begin working from the moment I wake up, but I take breaks throughout the day so I can have a long bath, make lunch and walk my whippet, Merlin”); and finding out about the “The Restaurateur With Bipolar Disorder Serving A Mood-Altering Menu” (“When dining, guests are asked to fill out a form about how they are currently feeling. Understanding the guest’s current emotional state allows Rafael to prepare and personalise a menu tailored to each diner.”).

Occasionally though, something anarchically opinionated slips through: a jarringly forthright anti-Russian piece on the relevance of the Ukraine war for Georgia, for instance, or an argument for a more proactive response to the monkeypox outbreak among gay and bisexual men. There’s an article arguing for the legalisation of all drugs in Mexico, and another suggesting that Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has become an international scapegoat. Yes, of course, the underlying politics throughout is liberal individualist self-realisation to-the-max. This is utterly unsurprising for a young woman with roots in a post-communist country, and for whom capitalism has so unambiguously worked. But there’s also an honourable attempt here to encourage an international outlook in a young fanbase. Rather than getting sniffy about the specifics, perhaps we should think more positively — as Lipa herself would no doubt encourage us to do — and see the benefit of this project as encouraging outward-looking habits of mind in an insular world.

As for me, though, I fear my enjoyment of the music is definitively over. I’ll never be able to hear Lipa in quite the same lobotomised way again. Henceforth, I’m switching my allegiance to Rita Ora, still pleasingly one-dimensional in my mind, equally gorgeous, and responsible for this little bit of pop heaven among other things. Worryingly, I see Ora has been interviewed for Louis Theroux’s new BBC series, on iPlayer at the moment. I haven’t watched and I’m not going to. If it turns out she is writing a play, founding a charitable trust, or learning Sanskrit in her spare time, please don’t tell me — I don’t want to know.

There is a reason for this. Has is known as “Little London” because so many of its people have left for the UK to find, if not a better life, at least some form of work. Its population was once 17,000 but now, thanks to migration, it hovers at around 5,000, of which only 14% are employed. According to its mayor, Liman Morina, more teenage boys leave the town for England than from anywhere else in Albania. He recently explained that 80% of “his constituents survive thanks to the “hard and honest work of their relatives in Britain”.

Yet Has is more than a peculiarity; it is an intense microcosm of a wider youth exodus afflicting Albania. Remittances (sending money home) now make up 31% of the country’s GDP. In the first six months of 2022 alone, emigrants sent home €376 million. In the UK, this is a story about migration. But in Albania, it is a homily: about what happens to societies whose people no longer believe in anything.

***

The man’s hair is slicked back fastidiously. He sips a drink in the bar of the Hotel Gjallica, in the town of Kukes, just up the road from Has. He clutches a dark rucksack like it’s a sick child. His name is Agim Mazreku and he is a local legend. Back in the Nineties, he was a successful currency trader and wrestler — a surreal combination that seems somehow perfectly normal here. When Albania’s financial system collapsed, Agim withdrew all his savings and stuffed the cash into a dark rucksack that he never let out of his sight. He was a wrestler; he could handle himself. Then one day the gangs came. Armed with guns, they took it all. Ever since, he has wandered the streets with an empty rucksack — a testament, both to his loss and that of his nation.

During the Nineties, Albania was an even tougher place than it is now. For almost 40 years, the country was ruled by the Communist tyrant Enver Hoxha, who lead an insurgency against the Nazis and then set about brutalising and imprisoning his own people. Hoxha was a strict adherent to Stalin’s take on Marxist-Leninism and he made Albania as close to a European North Korea as it was possible to get.

Eventually the people got tired of it all. In 1989, student uprisings led crowds to tear down Hoxha’s statue. Multiparty elections came in 1991; a year later, the Democratic party won for the first time. After decades of extreme communism, Albania was now officially capitalist.

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What happened next was, of course, a disaster. People now had a chance to take part in the capitalist ideal: to accumulate wealth. But the sudden transition to a market economy meant there was little understanding of how to make it all work. A fall was inevitable, and it came in 1997 with the pyramid schemes — Firmat Piramidale.

Capitalism in Albanian was born in trauma. In the immediate post-communist years, three private state banks had held 90% of national deposits, but bad loans meant the Bank of Albania placed stringent credit ceilings on them — leading to unsatisfied demand for credit and the growth of an informal market and deposit-taking companies which were investing on their own accounts instead of making loans. These companies gradually turned into pyramid schemes, whose nominal liabilities eventually amounted to almost half of the country’s GDP. According to the IMF, two-thirds of the population invested in them. So when the schemes collapsed, the country descended into anarchy.

“In 1997, the money went away like… poof.” My fixer Endri Guri snaps his fingers. “The gangs started killing each other.” We are sitting in a restaurant in Kukes. Endri is explaining his people’s relationship to money — and to the UK. “Here, for some, there is a belief that if you work a normal job you are a sucker,” he says. “And this leads people to the UK.”

He continues. “The majority of houses were rebuilt using money sent home by migrant workers who have gone to the UK to work, either with the false belief that the state will help — or the idea that there is a quick way to make cash. Many work in the drug trade. But this is all fantasy. If it’s not easy for British people, then it won’t be easy for Albanians.” Endi is in contact with an NGO called Terre des Hommes that seeks to help integrate returning migrants back into Albanian society. Many have been deported or simply come back after too much exploitation, from people smugglers and drug or trafficking gangs.

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There are, he tells me, two types of people who make the journey to the UK. The first are the majority: honest, hard-working people, driven to it out of economic necessity. “The type of Albanians who stay here are the type you British don’t see. In this town, you can leave your door unlocked.” But times are tough. The average family income is $1,500 (this assumes two working adults), while 69% of Albanians cannot meet their monthly bills. The second type, he says, are those who see a stigma in honest work. He mentions my hotel, which is filled with African migrants employed to help construct a local bridge. “Ask yourself why in a town of such high unemployment there are no locals. They don’t want to work there.”

Instead, they see the returning drug dealers as the epitome of success. “This place during Christmas is amazing,” Endi tells me. “All the migrants come back to the city, and it transforms — filled with new cars, most of them just rented for show, some of them worth two apartments, and this inspires all the kids: losers stay, winners leave.”

“Please understand one thing. It’s the youth who always leave, and the youth are easy to fool,” he continues. “Look at this fuckhead,” he indicates a teenage boy sitting on another table, with what I am quickly learning is the informal uniform for young men here: a puffer jacket (ideally Adidas), tight dark jeans and white trainers. “This is the Albanian youth style: the ‘gangsta’ look that does not privilege honest work — that is just for suckers. These Ali Gs love the idea of ‘easy money’ — the drug money Albanian rappers constantly talk about in their songs, and kids lap it up.”

I ask why this is. “It’s hard to go from extreme communism to extreme capitalism. Under communism, the issue was never ideology but survival: we’d line up for bread and there would be none.” Communism failed, and then, after the pyramid schemes wiped out the savings of those who had worked honestly for years, so did capitalism. Now democracy is seen to have failed, too. What is left in terms of authority is simple: who is the strongest or wealthiest. If you don’t join a gang, you will end up as a “loser”, a teacher or janitor who earns $300.

“So they go where their money is — and they become smugglers and they come back and are proud of it. People here don’t give a crap about how you earn your money — only that you have it. “Money is like a drug: the more you get, the more you need.”

***

Rifat Demilaj is the Executive Director of the Centre for Youth Progress, a local NGO that works on civic engagement and human rights, with a focus on youth. “We have been working with returnees from the UK,” he explains. “Most are looking for money to go back again. They didn’t find paradise in the UK, they found… different things. The most unfortunate get involved with trafficking groups. First they charge them £20,000 to get into the country which they have to work off. The gangs then find ways to keep them trapped. It’s modern slavery.”

I ask him why the UK is such a favoured destination over, say, France or Germany. “Well, first it’s that you need fewer documents to work there,” he replies. “And it’s not just the money; people here are sick of the endless bureaucracy.”

And there are other things, too. My mind flicks back to a conversation I had with a local barber who has recently returned from four years in London because he missed his children. “British people are more cultured,” he told me. When I asked if he would return to the UK, he replied: “Every kid in Albania wants to go to the UK because there are no jobs here and even when there are, they pay terribly. Even my kids want to go to the UK. If I had a chance to go with my children, I would.”

Demilaj continues: “After 30 years, politics has done nothing for the people while politicians have gotten rich. Even the opposition and government work together. They both tell people to stay in Albania while their children are educated outside. A lack of belief in anything is the problem.” The desire to leave is so entrenched that it has now entered the culture. “Go into school and ask the children what they want to be when they grow up and they say: ‘an immigrant’…”

“Yep,” says Endri, with a drawl. “It’s the British Dream.”

***

Later in the day, I meet Met Tobli, Director of the Municipal Office of Pre-Tertiary Education, a white-haired man who sits in a bare office underneath a portrait of the founder of modern Albania, Ismail Qemali. On his desk, Tobli has a holder containing three small flags: Albanian, American and EU. “My input would be to tell them not to leave. There are people here; if we can live here, you can live here too.”

I ask how they are trying to stop kids from leaving. He tells me that they avoid mentioning the subject directly so as not to give the students ideas. “[I’d say that] if you go to the UK, you will need to work to live. If you stay, you will work to live. You must work in both places. It’s not free or easy money.” I then ask him about the flags on his desk. “These?” he replies. “They symbolise where here we are going.” If Albania joins the EU will things change? I ask. “Of course.” We leave and walk through central Has. All around are refurbished buildings painted in bright colours. Just off a main thoroughfare is a house run to seed with a modern, glass-heavy extension bolted onto it like a small space station affixed to a hut. This, Endi explains, was built with migrant money.

Outside the Britain Resto Bar, I meet 17-year-old student Sara. She tells me that many of her classmates think about going to Britain. Her own brother is there — working in construction. “He says it’s a lot harder and it’s a lot different. And the thing is that many go without papers, which means people can blackmail them.” People see the UK as a very rich country where things come easy. Through her brother, she knows that is not the case — but still she wants to go one day, even just to visit.

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Inside, the bar is enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke. “It was built in February,” Endi tells me. The owner worked in the UK before coming back and bought it. Sitting in a corner sofa area with four of his friends — all in regulation jackets, jeans and trainers — the owner’s nephew tells me that his dad put in 20% of the money for the bar. They named it Britain because they have so many family members there. His family, he told me, has been working there for years, and now own a scaffolding business. I ask him if he intends to go; he grins and flicks open his passport, proudly showing me a UK visa. “You can’t stay here,” he says, “because of both the government and the state.” As we leave, I remark to Endi that the nephew seemed nice. “Yeah,” he replies. “He was a good fuckhead.”

It’s a strange compliment, but strange things happen when societies no longer believe in anything. In Russia, the people eventually just went through the motions of communism knowing it was all nonsense; now they do the same with democracy. In Has, where they grow up with no local institutions to believe in, the people festoon their town with the long-discarded accoutrements of another city. It’s a place where residents bolt UK licence plates to their cars, where they hang out in British-themed bars, and where a middle-aged man has spent decades walking the same grid of streets, clutching an empty rucksack that has become a mausoleum to all that has been lost.

***

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I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

 ***

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I’m here to find the hordes of marauding Albanians the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, claims are entering the UK from France under false pretences. “Many of the arrivals this year have been from Albania, so we are working closely with the Albanian government to encourage returns and processing cases and removals as swiftly as possible,” she said over the weekend. “[They are] making spurious claims that they are ‘modern slaves’, despite paying thousands to come to this country. This abuse of our system has to stop,” she concluded.

I arrive in Calais in the late afternoon and find a strip of restaurants, all neon and twinkly and even more depressed. I need to sit down and work, and for that I need WiFi. “Désolé que nous n’ayons pas de WiFi,” I’m told when I enter the first restaurant, which seems odd, but never mind. I try next door. “We have WiFi, sir, but we have no space,” the young waiter says with a smile, extending his arms to indicate the sweep of the restaurant. I follow his gaze across rows and rows of empty tables. A burst of emotion floods my chest and face: first confusion, then a sudden gust of hot shame and, finally, rage. The urge to punch his smirking face is immediate.

I understand that he has looked at me with my scruffy, bearded, Middle Eastern appearance and decided two things: first, that I am a migrant; and second, that he does not want me in his establishment. He could have just lied and said there was no WiFi, but no. It was his casual cruelty that I found most overpowering.

I walk out into the night and look back at the restaurant’s Moroccan name, marvelling at the cognitive dissonance. The sea is a gloopy mass in the moonlight. It’s time for bed.

***

Early the next morning, I head for the Zone Marcel Doret — an industrial area in the city’s outskirts where migrants can be shoved somewhere less obtrusive. Industrial complexes loom; the skyline is a vista of gesticulating cranes. The rain is insipid.

On a side street, I stumble across a row of tents pitched up tightly on the pavement. They are the same shade of blue as those handed out by humanitarian organisations from Congo to Lesbos. Here, though, they are more canopies than full tents, extending down from the fences to which they are attached, weighed down on the road by plastic jugs filled with water.

I call into one and, after some shuffling, a smiling face pops through the open flap. The man inside is from Afghanistan. I speak to him in Persian, assuming he’ll understand at least some of it. I ask him if there are any Albanians here. He looks confused, shakes his head, and then points to a tent across the street: “Talk to them. They are Iranian in there.”

Two men of Middle Eastern appearance are walking down the street. They’re dark and scruffy — like me. I suspect they wouldn’t be served down the road either. Hasan and Mahmoud are from Egypt. They arrived two weeks ago fleeing, they claim, persecution in Cairo.

Across the road more smiling faces appear from a tent opening. “Salaam Khoobeed? Man David Hastam, Madar-am Irani-e val-e farsi-am khoob nist.” (Hi, how are you? I’m David, my mother is Iranian, but my Persian is not good.) They cluck with courteous delight at my attempts to speak their language, as Iranians always do.

One man is middle-aged, with greying hair. His friends grin shyly and give me an incongruous thumbs up from beside him in the tent. Mehdi is from Tehran and claims he is fleeing the Mullahs. Life, he explains, was no longer bearable under the oppressive regime. Like everyone else here, he and his friends are hoping to get to the UK. What does he think of Calais? “Khoob nist.” (“Not good.”)

As I leave, Hasan calls out to me. “Can you help?” When I first started my career, I would have said that by talking to me he was publicising his cause, which might help bring about political change. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know; I know it probably won’t make any difference, and I refuse to patronise him with a lie. Instead, I hand him my Diet Coke and give him €10. I also give him my email and tell him to contact me if he makes it to England.

I drive back to the city centre in silence. In the middle of a square by the water I see a huge white marquee with a red rim. Yellow lights flicker in the gloom. I get out of the car and walk towards the entrance. “Calais Ville,” reads a small banner. A tattooed man is squatting on his haunches by the entrance, smoking. He sees me and stands up.

I ask what it is. “A circus,” he says with pride. With animals? “No,” he replies with a smile, “it’s a grand human spectacle.” A streamer flag flutters limply in the wind. I feel like weeping.

***

When the so-called Calais jungle was demolished in October 2016, more than 8,000 people lived there. Today, the locals tell me that Calais has “only” 3,000 migrants. Now, if you want to visit a big camp, you need to go 40km up the road to Dunkirk.

Jules is a Calais native, and doesn’t hold back as we drive to Dunkirk. As far as he is concerned, the migrants need to leave for the UK as soon as possible. To start with, they overwhelmingly speak English (French, he explains, is much harder to learn); and second, you need fewer papers to live and work in the UK.

He tells me how tough it is for the migrants to get to the UK. “It‘s almost impossible for them to get through the Eurotunnel because of all the border controls — and without papers, forget it,” he says. This is, of course, where the people smugglers — or the passeurs, as they call them here — come in. They lurk in almost all the city squares between Berck Sur Mer and Calais. What they charge varies, he says, but it can be up to €15,000.

Each night, the French police sweep the squares in their helicopters. The passeurs send lookouts to monitor the police’s activity; when the officers leave, senior gang members descend to find new customers. He continues. “Most of the migrants are not political refugees like they claim; they are here to work.”

We pull up to the Dunkirk jungle. The early morning drizzle has morphed into a downpour and to my right I see a small, sodden hell. A tent village floats on a brown mass of sludge. Near the entrance, a sign saying “Drinking Water” has been pinned to what appears to be a tower of large, stacked crates. Around the perimeter slouch several tents, all of which appear to have differing functions. To my left, people are lining up in one to receive essentials from what appears to be an NGO. Nearby are various men sitting among crates of plastic water bottles — clearly another drinking station. To my right, volunteers are unloading goods from the boot of a car to a group of waiting Ethiopians.

I make my way over to a canteen tent. Steel pots of tea whistle; a colossal vat, which I know from my travels in the Middle East can only contain rice, bubbles with bovine contentment. Here, I meet Ali, and his two friends. They are Kurds who made the trip from Erbil. They arrived two weeks ago and have been in the camp ever since.

“I want to go to England to work,” says Ali. “Back home there is no money.” I ask him how he intends to get across with no papers and he becomes coy. “We will try,” he replies. We both know what he means — an illegal crossing. He insists I have some rice and Kurdish soup. I thank him in Kurdish (“Spas”), which brings a smile to all three men. Amid their protests I tuck €20 under the vat.

I then meet my first Albanian. Michi is a fit-looking man in his mid-20s from a village near Tirana, and he has been in Dunkirk for only a few days. Michi explains he will speak candidly if I give him a pseudonym and take no photos. He tells me that many people from home are being encouraged to make the journey to the UK for the chance of a better “economic future”. What this actually means is to work in the drug trade. “Everyone knows what to do when they get here,” he tells me. “We know that there will be people here to meet us and to tell us how to get to the UK.” Michi knows that his fellow countrymen control large parts of the hard drugs trade in Britain, and there will always be work for young men like himself.

As an Albanian, Michi can enter the EU for up to three months without a visa. Then it’s just a matter of getting to Britain, either by calling a number that does the rounds among the Albanian diaspora in Dunkirk and Calais or by turning up at one of the places in Dunkirk that, again, everyone knows. “I’ll cross soon,” he tells me. “It will cost a lot, but hopefully in the type of ‘business’ I’ll be working in I can make it back quickly,” he says with a slight laugh.

That laugh stays with me as Jules and I drive back to Calais. As the child of migrants, my sympathy for most of these people is inescapable. When I met Mehdi, I could not help but think about how my own family once made the journey from Iran to Europe. But it was on a plane and not an illegal fishing boat, and they ended up not in a tent by the side of the road but in a house they bought in North London. There was no justice to that — it was just plain luck.

Back in the country that welcomed them in the mid-Seventies, Braverman is a laughing stock: she is crass and insensitive and politically obtuse. She warned of a looming “invasion”. What I saw in Calais was many things, but it was not an invasion; it was stilted, wretched human flow.

But she is not wrong when she says Albanians are coming over — often illegally and under false pretences — to engage in criminal activity.

Then there is the wider picture. Immigration has unquestionably benefited Britain — economically and culturally and socially. But numbers, increasingly from non-EU countries, are huge and growing. This is dangerous — not just for the political impulses it spurs, but also for the fear it unleashes. This is exactly what Braverman is trying to tap into with her clumsy rhetoric.

In Britain, her incompetence manifests as chaos: in Dover, where migrant centres have been firebombed; in London, where migrants have been dumped alone in the streets; and in Westminster, where the Government shows no sign of solving this crisis. Out here in France, however, the chaos is different. It’s more subdued, but it’s there. The migrants keep arriving, often totally legally; and they keep crossing to Britain, often totally illegally. The French try to stop them, but know they cannot. The people smugglers have won.

Outside Calais, painted onto a small building, is mural of a sea monster with “Bienvenue à Calais” scrawled next to it. “It’s a mural welcoming visitors to our lovely city,” he says with a sigh.

In her hand, Kadena held a megaphone. Now, she put it to her lips.

“My game is over,” she told the crowd below. “It was a pyramid game. My company is bankrupt. And you shouldn’t ask for the money.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. In that half a second, the wave of one of history’s stranger financial manias finally broke, tipping Albania towards civil war, and levelling the hopes of a generation. “We didn’t even take the eggs from our chickens to cook for our children,” was how a guard standing outside an Albanian university put it to me, in November of this year. “We just sell them and put the money into the schemes. But what happened after that? Tragedy.”

It was, in short, the Ponzi that ate a country. I had come to Albania to make a documentary for BBC Radio 4, trying to figure out how an entire country fell prey to a con. At their peak, the many different Albanian schemes, of which Sude was but one, had liabilities of £700 million — in a country whose GDP was only £2.1 billion. Was there something about this small disc of the Western Balkans that had made it so vulnerable to contagion? What happened in Albania is easy to dismiss: long locked to the bottom of Europe’s economic league tables, it’s the ultimate far-off land of which we know little. But the story of how it escaped from brutal Communism, wide-eyed and optimistic, only to collapse under brutal Capitalism is one that has the air of a fable.

After all, it wasn’t just farmers and peasants who committed financial suicide. Up the social scale, the middle classes would sometimes sell their homes, move into rented accommodation, then put the house money into investments. In Tirana, I met a lawyer, Lazer Sokoli, who only managed to convince his brother not to sell his family home by threatening never to speak to him again. Months later, he was at dinner with the same brother and his brother’s friend, when a TV in a corner of the restaurant broadcast news of riots, as investors clamoured to retrieve their cash. “The whole place went silent. Not only had my brother’s friend sold his house but also his sister’s. He went crazy … it turned out he’d lost everything. He is now in Germany, working hard to make ends meet and trying to repay his sister little by little.”

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How did an entire country fall prey to a con job? In 1945, Albania had become a hermit kingdom, under the grip of a tyrannical yet curiously uncharismatic dictator, Enver Hoxha. The borders were sealed. “I worked at a customs house,” Drago Kalimi, a former schoolteacher, told me. “Even when we welcome tourists in from Greece, we had to be accompanied by soldiers.” When, in 1992, the country emerged blinking into democracy, ordinary Albanians knew almost nothing of the outside world.

It’s perhaps understandable that they were naively optimistic when they elected as their first President, Sali Berisha, a tub-thumping former cardiologist. Berisha’s policy platform, as the analyst Remzi Lana put it to me, was: “everything in Communism, but with a minus sign in front of it.” From the stoniest socialism, Albania would attempt to take on the most free market of all capitalism.

At first, it worked. While the likes of nearby Bulgaria struggled to maintain a sluggish, hybrid economic system, Albania grew at more than 8% a year from 1993 to 1995. Some of that growth was real. But it gave plenty of cover for the pyramid schemes that were the nation’s undoing, which aimed to blend in. One, Vefa, actually had many genuine assets: they owned a chain of supermarkets, and petrol stations. Their name was on recognisable, everyday goods. It was natural to assume that they were legitimate, even if the rewards they offered were outsized.

“A cousin of mine was a broker for people looking to invest in these pyramid schemes,” explains the CEO of Tirana Business University, Artan Hoxha (no relation). “She was advising people to put some money in scheme A, some in Scheme B. Some in Scheme C. One has high interest but is not so secure; the other has low interest but is more sound. In her mind she was building a balanced portfolio. She didn’t know they were all the same shit!”

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No one was offering Albanians sound advice. The nation now technically had a free press. But as the schemes grew in stature, they began paying for ads on the newly-emerged private TV stations, and in the new newspapers. The media bosses knew which side their bread was buttered; soon enough, the press began to speak only favourably of the schemes. “This was before the internet,” was a refrain I heard more than once. “We didn’t know. We just couldn’t check.” For ordinary people, rather than becoming the proving ground for truth and debate, the mass media had almost immediately succumbed to fake news.

Democracy, too, failed them. The scheme bosses were well connected. They mixed with the new political elite, and called in favours to keep the state’s eyes elsewhere. Of course, the ballot box should have been the ultimate check: governments that crash the economy don’t last long. But all the short-term incentives were to ignore the problem. In fact, in the middle of dealing with a disputed election, President Berisha actually sent ministers onto TV to all but guarantee that the schemes were safe. They grew even bigger.

After Sude had collapsed, the government did intervene in two schemes, sending in the liquidators and managing to recoup between 40 and 60% of the capital. But here, a curious kind of human psychology took hold. Instead of gratitude, the public mood hardened. Investors chose to blame state meddling for destroying otherwise perfectly decent companies. People were unwilling to come to terms with the true size of the lie they’d been sold.

But soon enough, for Artan’s cousin, Lazer’s brother, and millions of others, there would be no more excuses, nowhere left to hide. In the chaos that followed the schemes’ unravelling, the nation’s armouries were raided. 700,000 guns evaporated into a total population of 3.5 million. For months, every night the crackle of shots could be heard in the big cities as new owners took their toys for a spin. In the southern town of Gjirokaster, a middle-class couple who had lost the moderate sum of $5000 in the schemes told me how they’d padded the walls of their house with books, to absorb stray bullets. Night after night, the husband slept in their photographic studio, with the gun he too had taken from an armoury, standing sentry against looters.

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The arc of the fable was now complete. In five years, Albania had gone from optimism and trust, to total disaster. Individual greed was supposed to power markets, but — un-tempered by oversight, checks and balances, a strong civic culture — it ended in beggar-thy-neighbour. Nineties Albania is perhaps an apt laboratory experiment in what happens when you leave things to themselves.

Added to it was its close relative: status anxiety. Many of the middle-class families I spoke to only got into the schemes late in the day. Partly, this was because they were more suspicious. But in the final phase of the mania, in mid-1996, many signed up because they felt they were missing out on what their peers had. “People didn’t ask questions. They had heard rumours that maybe the reason there was money was that it was being laundered,” Artan told me. “Most people were never concerned about where the money had come from. Just so long as they got their return.”

And for every investor who was genuinely naive, another was operating on the long-tested theory that there are always greater fools out there. Just as surely as anyone on the Lehman Brothers securities desk in 2008, they realised the schemes were doomed, but aimed to get out just before the whole house came tumbling down. Some succeeded. While thousands lost their homes in the crash, hundreds ended up with their own house and some other poor schmuck’s.

The mayor of Tirana tells me he still has people on his housing lists who lost their homes in ‘97. But in the past decade, Albania has quietly prospered. Today, the massive brutalist pyramid in downtown Tirana, originally designed as Enver Hoxha’s mausoleum, is being rebuilt as a coding academy, one sign of a building boom that has swept the capital. Increasingly, this is a land of Vodafone and Visa, well on its way to homogenisation within the EU empire.

Albanians seem to have survived by living in an eternal present. The country did not prosecute many of the crimes of Communism in the ‘90s, nor did it hold Truth and Reconciliation hearings. The maximum penalty for fraud — any fraud — was five years. Most of those who built the Albanian pyramids have long since done their time, if they were caught in the first place. In fact, many are now to be found in the swankiest restaurants of Tirana, rolling in and out of their SUVs.  “They say to me, ‘Arben how are you?’,” laughs the former finance minister, Arben Malaj.

But justice has seldom been high on the agenda in this part of the world. “Justice…” says Remzi Lani, “in general, it’s a kind of joke story in Eastern Europe.” With a weary Balkan fatalism, people have simply picked themselves up and moved on.

You can listen to The Great Pyramids Of Albania on BBC Sounds.

That isn’t to say that it has been an easy ride. Britain’s first lockdown seriously dented drug dealers’ freedom of movement, and their supply has been hit by a number of significant domestic and international drug busts. In the world of narcotics, at least, the past year will no doubt come to be remembered as an era of stockpiling, increased prices and lower quality cocaine as dealers “trod” heavily on their wares with more cutting agents — not to mention the resulting boom in the cannabis market.

Yet in many ways, today’s itinerant drug dealers, able to roam from door-to-door, are perfectly suited to life in lockdown — and that’s a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Once upon a time, punters, users, abusers, junkies and “nitties” (those itching, scratching, semi-feral addicts) had to venture out of their homes and scurry off into the night in search of a little dope.

In the early eighties, when I was barely a teen, I had a friend who wanted to score some weed and made me traipse with him to a “shebeen”, or illegal drinking club, operating out of a dingy squat in Stratford, East London. The place was occupied almost exclusively by Rastas who were either smoking big fat spliffs or selling tiny bags of weed. My pal, despite still being in his school uniform, scored a £5 bag containing a few buds, twigs and seeds and rolled a crappy joint. I took a puff of it, coughed my guts up, pulled a “whitey” and ran out of the gaff as paranoid as hell to the toilets in Stratford Shopping Centre, where I locked myself in a cubicle until I calmed down.

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In seventies and early eighties London, Rastas were to selling weed what the Royal Mail was to postal delivery services; they had a near monopoly on the trade, certainly at street level. In the absence of hydroponic technology, globalisation and, it must be said, what would become the British public’s penchant for exotic and eclectic highs, weed was a cottage industry with deep roots, and routes, to Jamaica. Anything stronger was the preserve of bohemians, the clubbing elite and the rich and famous. Even then, unless you were well-connected or in the entertainment industry, if you wanted drugs you needed to go out of your way to get them.

But in the decades since, Britain’s love affair with narcotics has taken on a whole new meaning. According to the Home Office’s latest figures, roughly three million people took recreational drugs in England and Wales last year, with around 300,000 in England opting for opiates and/or crack cocaine. In terms of valuation, the illicit drugs trade is worth an estimated £9.4 billion a year — which makes it larger than the UK music industry (£5.2 billion) and gaming industry (£2.9 billion) combined, and with an annual turnover bigger than several major high street chains, including Boots (£6.7 billion) and Primark (£5.9 billion).

Given that chronic weed, amphetamine and cocaine use appears to be as British as a Sunday roast, it’s no wonder that, in recent years, enterprising foreigners have moved into the UK drug market, “sniffing” easy money to be made. Indeed, thanks in part to the EU’s obsession with freedom of movement, its porous borders and, it must be said, our police forces’ flawed racial profiling which dictates that only black people sell, buy and consume drugs, Eastern European dealers have been able to force their way into a lucrative market.

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Eastern European dealers sussed early on that consumption is Britain’s metier, and they made hay with it. While scrawny British inner-city “hood rats” thought riding around on stolen scooters selling crack was a major step-up from dealing on street corners and council estate stairwells, Serbian and Albanian dealers were taking orders on WhatsApp and Telegram encrypted messaging services and delivering to punters’ doors in modest, but comfortably air-conditioned saloon cars. These dealers innovated the use of social media, with many advertising flash sales and “buy two, get one free” offers to regular clients, using price differentiation to offer “standard” and “premium” cocaine. Most importantly, they offered a reliable, consistent and relatively risk-free service.

In other words, they run their “phone operations” like businesses, rather than trap house outtakes from Top Boy. This contrast in modus operandi between Eastern European and native drug dealers is down to what you might call a differing account of “psychological subjectivity”. In other words, if you don’t think and act like a drug dealer, you won’t get caught like one.

Only last week, for instance, the Metropolitan Police publicised an operation it led which resulted in 154 arrests in London relating to County Lines activities: Officers “were also proactively on the look-out for suspicious activity in their efforts to tackle violence, the Met’s top priority,” it added. Two operative words here, “suspicious” and “violence”, provide a clue as to why Eastern European dealers have been so successful; they were, for a long time, absent from their crime narrative in Britain.

Just as with stereotypes surrounding the Italian mafia, Jamaican Yardies and Chinese triads, the image of the black-clad Bond-villain Russian invariably springs to mind when we talk about any criminal east of Berlin. But while Eastern European gang members are no strangers to violence, many of the dealers I’ve spoken to are singularly focussed on doing their job, and therefore distance themselves from any violence which may attract unwanted attention. Our conversations are usually prosaic: about football results, their children back home and, increasingly, how the traffic congestion caused by the closure of some bridge over the Thames is affecting their delivery times. If anything, Eastern European dealers in London operate more like Uber than the Barksdale Crew from The Wire. 

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And since lockdown, this work ethic has made it easier for them to adapt. One dealer I know is pretending to be a more orthodox “essential worker”, wearing a hi-vis jacket and driving around in a van as a cover. Others have changed their shift times, now usually working from just 4pm-6pm or weekends only. Some have even upped sticks and left the UK altogether, putting their phone operations on a skeleton staff until the much-anticipated summer boom.

One of the savvier young London dealers I know — who recently escaped a county lines operation after a “nitty” held him up for his stash with a hypodermic needle, and was then nearly stabbed to death by the gang he now owed money to — has gone “freelance”. He bought a scooter and uses a Deliveroo box as a cover story to sell crack, a move that’s become so common that the Met have started to randomly “stop and search” delivery bike riders.

More recently, though, the Met — perhaps realising that it could prove more fruitful — has decided to target the middle-class drug trade. When I worked as a producer on the Channel 5 documentary series Gangland, a constant refrain I heard from dealers was that gentrification is contributing to Britain’s ever-expanding drugs market. The Government certainly agrees; last week, it was revealed that it plans to launch a middle-class “information campaign” to make “snorting cocaine as socially unacceptable as drink-driving”.

Certainly their value to dealers cannot be underestimated. Aside from being spendthrift, reliable and creditworthy, middle-class punters are mavens when it comes to spreading the word about who’s got A-grade cocaine or ecstasy. If you’re a dealer, being able to boast that you have doctors, lawyers and media types in your contacts book is certainly a nice marketing touch. After all, the bourgeoisie love nothing more than knowing they’re in good company, even if they are contributing to a trade that results in Mexican gang members being decapitated every now and again.

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I learned just how valuable middle-class coke users are during the 2019 general election. Having got wind of a high-profile political client who was being “served up” by the friend of a source, I attempted to broker a deal with one of Fleet Street’s finest for the story. But at the last minute, the drug dealer baulked at my offers of fame, fortune and the opportunity to change the course of British political history. “Bro, it ain’t worth it,” he told me. “He’s my best customer.” When it comes to middle-class dealing, discretion is key; another reason why the professionalism of foreign dealers sells itself.

Just days before lockdown, The Sun reported that “London has become a hotbed of international criminals – from Albanian cocaine kingpins and African street gangsters to Turkish Cypriots”. When I asked an old source in the East End scene if this was yet more tabloid bluster, he simply said: “I moved to Essex to get away from that shit. Now they’re moving in here. You can’t compete with them.”

In some ways, I suppose it’s to be expected that a capital city of nine million people has its fair share of foreign dealers — just as it has its fair share of foreign businessmen. And with the UK bracing itself for the end of lockdown restrictions this summer, no doubt these “essential” workers are already preparing for the inevitable narco-bonanza that will follow.

“For most Albanians, it has always been our dream to join the European Union,” says Etleva Demollari, director of a new museum, House of Leaves, housed in the building that was the ‘Sigurimi’ (secret police) headquarters during the Communist dictatorship. Her own yearning to be included in the European project began when she was growing up in 1980s Tirana. Her city had become the poorest capital in the world: Communism’s biggest economic failure and a reflection of self-defeating isolationism.

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Demollari used to watch Italian TV stations through a reception ‘inverter’ her family had acquired. She was convinced it was the closest she’d ever come to experiencing another country, another way of life. International travel remained illegal throughout the 1980s, a hallmark of Enver Hoxha’s unique dictatorship. Each mile of the Balkan nation’s borders was enforced with bulbous barbed wire.

“Hoxha,” Demollari tells me, “was paranoid that any Albanian who travelled abroad could be recruited as a foreign agent.” Even the revered missionary Mother Teresa – canonised as a saint in 2016 – was considered a security threat in her home country: the Catholic nun was barred from returning from India to visit sick relatives. Meanwhile, some 6,000 Albanians (from a population averaging just two million) were executed for attempting to emigrate or challenge the state. A further 70,000 were interned as political prisoners.

Free elections failed to arrive when Hoxha died in 1985; six years later, then a university student, Demollari was part of a movement that went on to topple a seven-metre-high bronze statue of Hoxha. “We chanted as one: ‘Ne duam që Shqipëria të jetë si pjesa tjetër e Evropës’ [We want Albania to be like the rest of Europe].”

Demollari’s museum conceals chilling insight into the methods of surveillance, interrogation, torture and faux justice employed in Albania from the 1940s – when some assert that the Nazi party’s Gestapo also had a base here – right up until 1991. “It’s for Albanians,” she says “but it’s for foreigners also; to show how Albania was, so they can understand better this part of our identity. The history of Albania is different to the rest of Europe: more harsh, more power [abuse], more isolated.”

The museum was conceived by Albania’s ministry of culture, part of a published mission to achieve cultural integration with Europe. It represents the ultimate soft power play for a government desperate to finally open concrete EU entry negotiations in July, after 10 years of sustained effort to Westernise through condemning past sins.

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A charm offensive has been building since 2006, when the government first accepted and passed a resolution from the European Council that the crimes of the nation’s Communist regime should be “held equivalent” to those of Nazism. Within three years, Albania had formerly applied for membership to the EU. But it took five years for the nation to be officially recognised as a candidate. Until 2014, EU leaders weren’t persuaded that Albania was committed to tackling a problem that the nation seems unable to shake: corruption.

The election of the current government in 2013 was persuasive. The Socialist Party made stern pledges to enact a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption. And six years on, the European Council has recommended fresh assessment of whether the Balkan outpost now recognises the democratic standards it expects of members. A verdict is due this month and formal accession talks are expected to commence in July.

But has Albania’s progress been significant enough? Last year, the US Department of State identified “rampant corruption” in the nation. And just this weekend, thousands of protestors turned out in Tirana, calling for Rama’s resignation – accusing the man who was supposed to save the country from corruption of perpetuating it. In response, the Albanian president, Ilir Meta, cancelled the local elections due to take place on 30 June. He stated that the current politic chaos did not provide “the necessary conditions for true, democratic, representative and all-inclusive elections.”

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The huge demonstrations that have been taking place in the capital for weeks now were born out of long-standing frustration about endemic corruption and cronyism in day-to-day living. These demonstrations began when grievances about the education system came to a head.

Some students are angry about classmates being able to buy better grades. Others fear missing out on jobs to rivals from richer families, who they say they will bribe their way into employment.

Sara Kureta, a 19-year-old philosophy undergraduate, believes the prospect of joining the European Union could help her country to become a truly meritocratic society.

“I don’t have much money and my parents don’t have rich friends so corruption could be damaging for me,” says Kureta. “My friend’s mother paid to get a job as a nurse, which is really scary because you shouldn’t be able to do a job like that if you aren’t qualified to do it.”

“To be in the EU you have to have some common values and for us that will be really positive progress… I see the potential progress in an ethical way, and not in an economic way.”

At the moment, it is not just an alliance of nationalist parties in the European Parliament that is against further expansion of any kind. Broader scepticism remains elsewhere.

Marsida Turku, a medical student who works in ‘BunkArt2’ – another museum commemorating the victims of the Albanian dictatorship – has experienced international hostility. “I’ve been to Italy, Germany and Greece,” she begins. “Many people in these countries think we are still ‘in’ Communism and some that we are in some kind of war.”

“I don’t know why there is this opinion all over the world,” Turku continues. “We are maybe not the most developed country in Europe, but we are trying.”

Plenty of Albanians feel their fate should not rest on validation from the EU. “Some of us think it is unnecessary,” says Turku. I am among them. If we want to do something for our country, we can do so even if we are not part of the Union.”

Which could be just as well. Accession talks are an infamously drawn-out process, and Albania’s image is damaged by every fresh corruption claim. The nation has largely transformed since the grim days of Hoxha. But this month, a decade after Albania’s first bid to join the EU, will it be deemed democratic enough?