Thursday 11:57
The Examiner
(Narco-Patriots, continued) The political class diagnoses a narco-state. The data point instead to tourism, capital flows, and a textbook case of structural transformation. by Keler Marku (Washington D.C) In the first installment of the alleged narco-tale — narco-money in cooperation with the narco-state building narco-resorts for narco-influencers to take Instagram photos of the narco-free flamingos — …
The Examiner
Albania does not run on drug money, and its prosecutors never behaved as if it did. The dependency myth survives anyway, because it has customers, and some of them are hostile. By Bekim Besimi (Venice) There is a sentence about Albania that circulates in London tabloids, in Rome courtrooms, in Brussels corridors, and in …
The Examiner
By Drizan Shala, Security Desk Violence inside a protest movement is never a single data point. It is a signal that must be read against the movement’s trajectory, and on Day 33 of the Tirana protests the trajectory tells a specific story. The turn to street violence reveals two things at once, and neither …
The Examiner
The cold arithmetic of a very warm country by Keler Marku (Washington D.C) In the spring of 2026, tens of thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana. They called it the Flamingo Revolution — after the flamingos of Zvërnec, a protected coastal wetland threatened by a resort project on a nearby former …
The Examiner
By Ylli Manjani (Tirana) There are commentators who say it with a strange calm: “Come on. They only threw eggs. No harm done.” Very well. What exactly must happen before we agree that we are looking at violence? Must bombs be thrown? Must there be casualties? Or does violence earn its name only once it is …
The Examiner
Solidarity with a protest is open to any member of the European Parliament. The deployment of the Parliament’s authority against an elected government is a different act, and it travels under the same name. Besart Ruka (Tirana) A member of the European Parliament carries two things that are easily confused, and the distinction between …
The Examiner
A fabricated story about an Albanian island helped ignite the protests convulsing Tirana. Now a United States senator has made it the centerpiece of his re-election. Tirana Examiner Picture the scene in Savannah. A United States senator, locked in the hardest re-election fight any Democrat faces this cycle, stands before a friendly crowd and …
The Examiner
They speak of reform. The letter they sent to the ambassadors describes something else: the transfer of power from elected institutions to an unelected authority. Albatros Rexhaj The letter from the Protest Coordinating Group, delivered to the Western ambassadors in Tirana, closes with a sentence that betrays the whole document: “These demands represent the …
The Examiner
Kreshnik Spahiu asked the question no foreign correspondent will. The days since have answered it for him. by Elis Zenelaj (Tirana) The wire went up overnight. The people of Zvërnec walked down to the water on a morning in late May the way they had walked down to it all their lives, and found …
