Democrat Protest Drops U.S. Flags for German Ones — Lawyer Reads a Chapter Closing

the Newsroom (Tirana)

A Democratic Party protest in Tirana on Monday night drew attention less for its size than for a conspicuous symbolic shift: American flags, a fixture at recent opposition rallies, were absent. German ones flew in their place.

For legal analyst Kreshnik Spahiu, speaking live on Report TV following the demonstration, the switch was not incidental. It marked the formal end of a political bet that Sali Berisha had placed on Donald Trump’s return to power — and lost.

“PD today opened a new chapter,” Spahiu said. “They were disappointed by Trump, removed the American flags and raised the German ones. The chapter has closed, the one in which America would topple Rama and the Trump administration would back Berisha.”

The investment in that bet, Spahiu argued, was substantial. “After losing millions of euros on Trump’s lobbyists, they didn’t even get the non grata designation lifted, weren’t invited to Washington — but Rama was.” The pivot to Germany, in his reading, is not a principled realignment but an opportunistic one: Berisha is now seeking to exploit Berlin’s pressure on Tirana over the parliamentary immunity vote on Belinda Balluku.

Spahiu’s characterisation of the Democratic Party was blunt. “PD blows wherever the wind blows,” he said, describing an organisation that reorients itself around external leverage rather than domestic political conviction.

The German angle has a concrete dimension. A recent PD delegation to the Bundestag, Spahiu reported, was told directly by German MPs that the party’s path to power runs through internal renewal. “They were told: if you want to come to power, you need to elect a new leader in May.” Whether that message has been relayed to Berisha — or whether Berisha has relayed it to his base — Spahiu doubted on both counts.

The result is an opposition leadership in a structurally awkward position: a defendant in a SPAK proceeding, leading a crowd in protest against corruption. “What is happening today,” Spahiu said, “is that a SPAK defendant is directing a crowd against other corrupt people.”

Yet Spahiu did not dismiss the protest’s tactical effectiveness outright. The Democrats, he noted, retain a practised ability to generate news disproportionate to their numbers. “PD has experience with protests. It is capable of producing news, even with a thousand protesters, not only in Albania but abroad.” That capacity, he argued, serves a specific internal purpose: keeping smaller opposition parties marginalised and the spotlight fixed on Berisha alone.

“By not allowing any other alternative party to grow, he drowns out other opposition voices, takes the lead, and moves forward,” Spahiu said. The logic is one of attrition — hold the monopoly on opposition, wait for public fatigue with the government to do the rest. “He is waiting for the cost of living to bring down Rama, and he has put his milk bottle first in the queue.”

With parliamentary elections on 11 May approaching, the protest reads, in Spahiu’s framing, less as a mobilisation toward power than as a holding action — a way to remain visible, relevant, and indispensable to a constituency that has, for now, nowhere else to go.