Placards bearing satirical messages have enlivened mass protests in the Albanian capital Tirana demanding the cancellation of a controversial tourist resort project linked to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. They are also calling for the resignation of Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has strongly backed the scheme.
Sparked by environmental concerns about the displacement of wildlife for the planned luxury tourist complex on Sazan island, flamingos have become a key emblem – hence the nicknaming of the protests as the “Flamingo Revolution”.
Some of the messages displayed on placards poke fun at Kushner’s wife Ivanka Trump, a vocal advocate of the upscale island idyll. But they also mock what protesters see as entrenched, old-style politicians such as Rama and the opposition Democratic Party leader, Sali Berisha.
Rama, who has refused to cancel the resort project, has dismissed what he calls “meme-mania”, but Albanian media freedom activist Blerjana Bino believes that the caricatures expose political absurdities and highlight demands for accountability from the government.
“At its core, a protest meme does what political caricature has historically done: it takes a serious situation, reduces it to a recognisable image, joke, or symbol, and through irony exposes the contradiction, arrogance or absurdity that protesters perceive in the powerful,” Bino told BIRN.
The placard-borne mini-satires play well in the social media era, Bino argued. “A meme placard can communicate faster than a long political statement, because it uses cultural codes that people immediately recognise,” she said.
Communications lecturer Ervin Goci noted that while these slogans are being disseminated online, they gain their power from being displayed in public. “Even though they circulate online, that circulation functions more as a roundabout to bring people into the square, into a digital-physical community,” Goci said.
