IDAHOBIT From Tirana: A Sunday in May, Six Days From Our Pride

It is Sunday morning in Tirana. We are at the café we always come to when we have a piece to write — the one a block off Blloku where the espresso is good, the waiter has long stopped pausing before asking if we want one bed or two, and the dog under the next table is the same dog we wrote about a year ago. He has gotten older. So have we. So has the city.

Today is May 17 — IDAHOBIT. The Pride parade is six days away. We have spent enough Mays in Tirana now that we can see, from the chair we are sitting in, how the day has changed.

What we can see from here

A small rainbow banner hangs from a lamppost three buildings down the block. It went up Tuesday — we know because we walked past Monday and there were no banners, and Tuesday morning there were eight along this single street. None of them are dramatic. They are the small, municipally-approved kind, in the same format that the city uses for cultural festivals. That is the new part. The city is using the same visual vocabulary for Pride that it uses for the jazz festival and for the Albania Day flag week. It is administrative. It is unremarkable. That is what is remarkable.

The Dutch embassy is flying its rainbow. The German embassy is flying its rainbow. The EU mission is flying its rainbow. The UK is flying its rainbow. The US embassy is not flying its rainbow. The empty flagpole is its own kind of statement, and several Albanian friends have texted us about it in the last three days. (We have written about the US rights rollback elsewhere; we won’t relitigate it here.) The notable thing about 2026 is that the absence of the US flag is being commented on by Albanians, not just by us. That would not have been true in 2023.

The IDAHOBIT moment in Tirana itself is small. There is a public gathering at Skanderbeg Square at five this afternoon, organized by PINK Embassy and a coalition of allied groups. It is being framed less as a separate event and more as the soft opening of Pride week. The thinking — and we agree with it — is that bundling IDAHOBIT into the runway for the parade lets one mobilization carry both. The smaller country, the smaller community, the more sense it makes to consolidate.

What this date used to look like

We arrived in Tirana for the first time in late 2022. The IDAHOBIT we caught that next May, in 2023, was a closed event in a community space with a heavy police presence outside, a few diplomats inside, and roughly the same hundred faces that show up for everything queer in this city.

In 2024, the day moved partly outside. There was a small public table outside the National Theatre with literature and a banner. By midday the table had been the subject of one Facebook post by a far-right account, three police visits (two friendly, one less so), and one stand-off with an older man who wanted to take the banner. The organizers stayed cheerful. The day ended without incident.

In 2025, the day was bigger. The mayor’s office sent a representative. There were two banners and a small stage near Reja, the Cloud pavilion. A handful of MPs from the Socialist Party stopped by. It started feeling less like a brave act and more like a fixture.

In 2026 — today — it is a fixture. The lamppost banners are up. The embassies are out. The public gathering is at Skanderbeg, not in a side street. The conversation around it has shifted from “will it be allowed” to “what’s the program.” That is, by Balkan standards, a substantial shift in three years.

What we are watching for the next six days

Tirana Pride 2026 is May 23. We have been writing about it for two months now and will be on the parade route ourselves. There are three things we are watching in the coming week:

First, whether the new gender equality law — the one Albania’s parliament passed last year, which we have written about at length — gets meaningfully invoked in the Pride speeches. The law protects against gender identity discrimination but does not recognize same-sex partnerships. Last year’s parade leaned hard on what the law did do; this year, with EU accession negotiations entering Cluster 5, the question is whether the parade leans into what the law does not yet do.

Second, the counter-protest. Last year’s was small and contained. The far-right account that has tried to mobilize against the parade for three years now has a slightly bigger online footprint than it did in 2025. We will be paying attention to whether anything visible materializes, and how the police handle it. The police have been good for two years running. Three would be a pattern.

Third, the visible international presence. Last year, we counted six ambassadors and roughly thirty diplomats. The number to watch this year is the EU delegation’s attendance — both who shows up and what they say. Albania’s accession push has made Tirana Pride into a small but real diplomatic moment, and the show of support is itself a piece of policy.

A note about the day

The 2026 global theme for IDAHOBIT is “At the Heart of Democracy.” We have a longer day-of piece elsewhere on the site about what that theme is doing globally. From a chair in Tirana, the framing lands a little differently. The threat to LGBTQ+ rights in Albania has never been from the strength of homophobia in particular. It has been from the weakness of the institutions that should defend any minority — courts that move slowly, prosecutors who often don’t, ministries that can be captured. Every step forward on LGBTQ+ visibility here has been, simultaneously, a step forward on whether the institutional plumbing of a Balkan democracy can be made to work.

That is what we mean when we say the day looks different from here. In some places, IDAHOBIT is a rebuttal to a hostile state. In Albania, it is increasingly a working test of a state still figuring out what it wants to be.

We will be at Skanderbeg this afternoon. We will be on the parade route on Saturday. We will write again tomorrow. The Sunday espresso is finished. The city is humming. The dog under the next table is asleep. Six days to go.