Dua Lipa, a British pop star born to immigrants from Kosovo, has been accused of fueling nationalism after posting a map of Greater Albania that shows the country annexing large chunks of its neighbors like Serbia and Greece.
The singer, who usually makes media headlines over her pop hits breaking streaming records, has now found herself in the center of attention for different reasons entirely – her apparently nationalist views.
In a tweet on Sunday, Lipa defended the “indigenous rather than migrant” origin of Albanians. Attached to her tweet was a map of Albania that shows it owning parts of Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, as well as that of Serbia and its breakaway province of Kosovo, with the word “autochthonous” written below.
It was the same banner that caused an international incident in 2014, when a drone flew it into a soccer game between Serbia and Albania in Belgrade.
It wasn’t lost on many viewers that the map illustrates a nationalist idea of ‘Greater Albania’, a historical concept that promotes the unification of all Balkan lands having a significant ethnically Albanian population. Soon, the image drew thousands of users invested in the controversial Balkan politics, along with many pop fans unaccustomed to this kind of discourse.
Many users took Lipa’s tweet as supporting an Albanian take-over of the Balkans. Serbian-Canadian filmmaker Boris Malagurski called her out for supporting the “extreme nationalist & expansionist project of Greater Albania.” Others even accused Lipa of “showing sympathy towards fascism,” since the only time the enlarged Albania existed was as an Axis vassal state during World War II.
Pop music fans on Twitter gave in to the moral panic and were surprised by what they saw as a pop-idol “coming out as a fascist.” Some users began pushing the #cancelDuaLipa hashtag.
Others defended the singer, saying that her message was being misinterpreted. Team Albanians, a pro-Albanian US nonprofit, said that Lipa was debunking the “dangerous far-right claims that Albanians are not indigenous people in the Balkans.”
Lipa is no stranger to being criticized. In January she invoked the anger of online feminists, who at that time wanted to cancel her over throwing dollar bills at female strippers.
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