Thursday 00:49
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 …
The Examiner
The boulevard promises a new country and proposes the oldest idea in our politics: that the opponent is not to be answered, but removed. By Ylli Manjani (Tirana) The flamingo revolution, balanced as ever on a single leg, has begun to preach a “New Albania.” Not as a political project, nor an economic one, …
The Examiner
The novelist Beqë Cufaj, Kosovo’s former ambassador to Germany, looked at the protests in Tirana and saw a country being romanticized onto the streets at the worst possible moment. He was right to be suspicious, and the suspicion leads somewhere his short post only pointed. Ardit Rada (Tirana) A flamingo makes a good photograph. …
The Examiner
A senior fellow of the Atlantic Council has used the Washington Post, and the authority his title carries into this region, to advance three assertions about the Albanian protests and the project at their centre. Each fails on the public record. Each is aimed in a single political direction. This Desk sets the badge beside …
The Examiner
The accusations are repeated every day. The proof is still awaited. Until then, the judgment of a prime minister must begin from what he built, not from what his opponents say about him. Albatros Rexhaj There is an Albania that my generation remembers without needing to search for it in archives. It was the …
The Examiner
Edi Rama answered the Financial Times. A strategist answered Rama. The coverage printed his badge and left out his stake. by Klea Ukaj (Michigan, USA) Edi Rama gave the interview on 23 June, three weeks into the protests. Asked whether he was the “Godfather” the demonstrators accuse him of being, he refused the premise …
