For more than 35 years, Albanian politics has operated within a closed and repetitive cycle. Power alternates between the same actors; opposition organizes protests; citizens fill the streets; clashes with police occur; sometimes people are injured or killed, as on January 21, 2011 — and yet, structurally, nothing changes. Economic indicators stagnate, emigration accelerates, and public trust continues to erode.
This is the political ecosystem in which Adriatik Lapaj and the movement “Albania Becomes” have emerged. While presented as a civic resistance against Edi Rama’s government, Lapaj’s protest raises a more uncomfortable but necessary question:
Is this truly a challenge to the system, or another mechanism through which the system preserves itself?
The Function of “Controlled Dissent”
Authoritarian or semi-authoritarian systems rarely suppress dissent entirely. Instead, they often manage it. Protest is allowed, even dramatized, as long as it remains predictable, personalized, and strategically harmless. In Albania, this model has repeated itself for decades: demonstrations that generate images, arrests, media attention, and emotional rhetoric — but no institutional rupture.
Lapaj’s protest fits this familiar pattern. The encampment in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, the police intervention after midnight, the injuries, arrests, and public statements from the hospital all resemble a script Albanians have seen many times before. The protest creates tension and spectacle, but not leverage.
Neither Power nor Opposition Is Truly Threatened
Crucially, Lapaj does not seriously endanger either pillar of the political monopoly:
- Edi Rama’s government faces no institutional risk from a protest that lacks mass mobilization, national coordination, or an electoral strategy capable of replacing power.
- Sali Berisha’s opposition, whose credibility has collapsed for large segments of society, benefits indirectly: public anger is channeled away from the old opposition and absorbed by a “new face” that does not actually dismantle the old order.
In this sense, Lapaj functions as a buffer — a way to absorb social frustration without allowing it to crystalize into a systemic alternative.
The Illusion of Newness
Although framed as a fresh civic movement, the demands themselves are not new: resignation, transitional government, early elections. Albanians have heard these calls for decades. What is missing, again, is a structural program: how institutions will be rebuilt, how economic power will be redistributed, how state capture will be dismantled.
Without that, protest becomes symbolic rather than transformative.
A Familiar Outcome
History suggests the likely outcome:
The protest will eventually fade, exhaustion will set in, legal cases will drag on, and the political system will remain intact. The government survives. The opposition waits its turn. Citizens continue to leave the country.
This does not mean Lapaj is consciously “working for” Edi Rama or Sali Berisha in a conspiratorial sense. Rather, he operates within a political architecture designed to neutralize real change. Whether intentionally or not, his role serves the continuity of the system.
Conclusion
Adriatik Lapaj is not the problem by himself. He is a symptom.
A symptom of a political system that has perfected the art of surviving protest, recycling anger, and presenting “new” figures who never truly threaten the foundations of power. Until a movement emerges that breaks this cycle — organizationally, economically, and institutionally — Albania will continue to witness protests that look dramatic, feel emotional, and change nothing.
In that sense, Lapaj is not outside the system.
He is one of its mechanisms.