To understand what is at stake in what is now being called the “Flamingo Revolution," I found myself returning to Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Their argument is simple, and it explains a great deal about Albania’s past and present.
Every country runs on two kinds of institutions: political ones, which decide who holds power and how that power is checked, and economic ones, which decide who can own, build, trade, and profit. These two kinds of institutions come in two basic forms.
Inclusive institutions spread power widely among their people and protect it with real checks. Politically, that means more than one group has a say, and no single faction can rewrite the rules to suit itself. Economically, it means property rights are secure, markets are open similarly to everyone, and anyone with a good idea can enter and compete.
Extractive institutions do the opposite. Politically, power is concentrated in a narrow group, and there are few real limits on what that group can do with it. Economically, the rules are written by that same group, for that same group. Public resources, contracts, licenses, land, and regulatory decisions flow toward the people in power and their allies. Everyone else pays the cost.
The key insight is that these two sides are not separate problems. They lock together. A small group that controls politics will design economic rules that enrich itself. The wealth it extracts then pays for the loyalty, the media, the security services, and the patronage networks that keep it in power. Each turn of the wheel makes the arrangement harder to break.
This is the vicious feedback loop. It is the engine behind almost every story of national failures across continents and centuries, from colonial plantation economies to modern dictatorships to captured democracies, where elections happen on paper but judges, the elite, the administration, and the media are being bought or pressured.
Albania through that lens
Seen through this lens, Albania’s history is not a series of unrelated failures. It is the same pattern in different costumes and colours. Ottoman rule, the interwar period, the communist dictatorship, and much of the post-1990 transition. They share a similar basic shape or recurring pattern: power concentrated in a narrow group, economic rules written to benefit that group, and the proceeds used to entrench it further. The actors change. The labels change. The pattern is similar, despite different intensities.
What has been built in Albania in the last three decades fits the pattern: political power is concentrated, the checks on it are thin, and the economic rules (who wins public tenders, who gets concessions, who is judged rightly and who is not, who is investigated and who is shielded, who can operate freely and who cannot) track political and financial loyalty more than merit or law.
Can the mold be broken?
The harder question is whether the vicious loop can be broken and how nations can shift their trajectory to inclusive institutions where all may prosper. The authors and history give a clear and honest answer: there is no recipe. The process is slow and fragile.
But there are conditions that make a transition possible:
The first is a broad coalition: Movements that succeed in changing institutions are the ones that unite many different groups across society. Narrow movements, even when they win, tend to become the next extractive elite. They simply take the same machinery and point it at different beneficiaries.
Second is free flow of information: Pamphlets did this work during the Glorious Revolution. Newspapers did it in nineteenth-century democracies. Today social media and messaging platforms do it at scale and more effectively than ever. We see this in the Albanians' mobilization over social media right now. Information alone does not topple anything, but without it a broad coalition cannot form.
The third is durable organization: Protests that disperse leave the extractive machinery intact. What changes institutions is the broader society that keeps showing up, be it in groups, networks, and habits of cooperation that outlast any single moment of mobilization and keep pressure on whatever comes next.
These are important aspects worth noting about the Flamingo Revolution so that it can become sustainable and, indeed, revolutionary as its name states.
What is happening is an inspiring movement, unseen in many years. It is showing how the society, especially young generations, are ready to rise and break the mold. They have carried the weight of this vicious loop on their shoulders long enough, and they now refuse to treat it as just the way things are.
The point is not to predict the outcome. The point is to recognize that Albania has been here before, in different forms, and that we will decide the difference between a real institutional shift and another rotation of the same machinery.
This is why awareness matters now and not later.
The Flamingo Revolution is a chance, however fragile, to write a different ending. But it should not be left to chance. It demands a broad coalition that refuses to be narrowed into factions, a free flow of information that no government and no oligarch can quietly close, and citizens organized well enough to still be standing when the pressure rises. The work is not comfortable, and it is not quick.
The question is this: can there be organization and mobilization behind it that will shift the pattern and still be there in one year, in five, in ten... long after the streets have gone quiet?
If we understand what is at stake, and if we act while the window is open, this generation can be the first in Albania’s modern history to break the mold instead of inheriting it.
