Prime Minister Rama has made a strategic move that could put Albania into a phase of "managed instability"

1.

Prime Minister Rama gathered the socialist leadership last week and presented them with a platform for governing in the fourth mandate called “BESA.” The prime minister’s speech could be reminiscent of the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when communist leaders, after describing the protests as the activities of foreign services, began to adopt the language of the protesters into the new discourse.
Or when the protesters were divided into "patriotic socialist youth" and "reactionary forces that are using the youth", something like today's division between "flamingos" and "crows and ravens".

Or when Prime Minister Rama uses a concept-word that the last communist leader of East Germany had used in 1989. In the platform document presented to the socialist leadership titled “Besa”, the subtitle is “the turn of the fourth mandate”. In 1989, Egon Krenz announced the Party’s new policy, “Wende” which in Albanian translates as “turn”.

Albania is far from East Germany in all respects. But its leaders—including the fact that the SP won multiparty elections in a NATO member state—have the same approach to the crisis: finding the answer within the current governing model. Krenz sought a “wende” within the ruling Communist Party system, “Besa” seeks a turnaround within the current hybrid model of power led by the SP.

2.

More than in the communist past, the analogy will be sought in corporate culture.
“BESA” can be read as a manual for customer care. The initial premise of this document is that “the transformation of a country and the social experience of the transformation are no longer in harmony, but in tension”. Or as Prime Minister Rama explains, the essential reason for the protest is the “paradox of success”: citizens have benefited so much from governance that their expectations have increased, which are not met by the state administration. BESA takes the transformation as a fait accompli, while placing the discrepancy in the way the citizen experiences it.

In an analogy to a telephone company that has a manual for handling customers regarding the 5G network, BESA’s “customer care” has seven tasks: listening, proving, explaining, caring, measuring, learning and predicting. This SP service must address the Party’s achievements with the citizens of the country – listening, providing proof and explanations, showing care, measuring the mood, learning from the citizens and predicting how the Party’s program, Rilindja 2.0, will be implemented further.

BESA, similar to the telephone company, sees the citizen as a customer who can complain about the quality of service, not as a bearer of sovereignty who can change the direction of the company/government. This perception may be one of the problems that has brought citizens to the streets.
And it's unlikely that a customer care manual will steer them away from it.

3. 

However, Prime Minister Rama has made a major move. Nearly two months after the demonstrations began, he largely moved away from the emphasis on identifying the protest as the product of malevolent external forces (Iran, the Serbs, competing tourism countries, and other global forces collaborating with “crows and ravens”). He declared that “flamingos” were the critical part of society that would guide the socialist government further. 

This is initially a tactical maneuver, which instead of confrontation uses the technique of absorption: the protest and the protesters no longer need to explain themselves, because the prime minister will do this with the instruments of the “BESA” platform. The prime minister has also shaped this maneuver in the graphic design of the brochure, by inserting the flamingo on the cover. From a symbol of opposition, the flamingo transforms into an emblem of reforming the government that opposed it. Thus, they are now considered understood by the prime minister and the Socialist Party. The whole thing will be operationalized in the “fourth mandate governing turn”.

This tactical maneuver is also a strategic move.

Prime Minister Rama has gone from ignoring, rejecting, mocking, and demonizing — various ways of showing that the protest was unimportant to the socialist decision-making majority — to the phase of recognizing it as a force; moreover, tacitly implying that it is also a force that affects the stability of this majority's governance.

This is the transition from denial to partial acceptance: the existence of the problem is accepted, but not the explanation that the protesters give for it.

4.

Prime Minister Rama's half-step is an instrument of crisis management, not necessarily of its solution. But, as such, it is a warning of the weeks and months that await the country and of the Prime Minister's current disposition to overcome the crisis by absorbing the "Flamingo Movement". 
The outcome of this effort by the Prime Minister cannot be prejudged today, but no matter how great the differences between Serbia and Albania (in matters of Western orientation, European identity, etc.) Albania can learn from the similar strategic decision of the Serbian president in the face of a much larger protest movement than the one in Albania today. At that time, the Serbian president decided to manage the crisis by not addressing the systemic problems.

In November 2025, the Belgrade Center for Security Policy (BCSP) envisioned four paths for Serbia: a prolonged blockade with controlled repression; an EU-negotiated transition to a technical government and elections; escalation of repression towards destabilization or authoritarian consolidation; and early elections with the possibility of change, but also with a high risk of manipulation.

Eight months later, the authors of a newly published analysis found that Serbia had not pursued either in its pure form. A hybrid scenario had emerged: political gridlock, calibrated repression, institutional capture, and deliberate exhaustion of democratic forces. The crisis was not being resolved; it was being managed as a method of rule. The authors call this “managed instability.”

In Serbia, it was shown that managed instability is not passive coexistence with the crisis. It is a strategy by which the government does not resolve the crisis, but controls its intensity, pace and duration. The government presents itself as the only guarantor of order.

This could be the strategic turning point in the crisis Albania has entered. But Albania is not Serbia. The question for the next article would be why “managed instability” does not have a high probability of success in Albania?

(Source: Koha.net)