Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

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By Aris Roussinos

Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

Aris Roussinos visited the fraught country at the height of what is now being called the Flamingo Revolution, speaking to activists, opposition leaders, and even the country’s embattled PM himself — who believes that his people have never had it so good. 

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“Why am I living in England?” Avni, an Albanian in his 40s working in London as a builder, asked me angrily, as we walked to the lines of riot police separating Albania’s Flamingo Revolution protesters from the country’s parliament. “Albania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn’t be immigrants. We should come back home,” he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now entirely depopulated, as everyone who could had already decamped to Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

“Because the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn’t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you’ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they’ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It’s a really, really corrupted government, and we’ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.”

It was the 54th and most violent day so far of the street protests that have overshadowed Albania’s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. “Everyone thinks that this is a democratic state,” Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting “Down with communism!” and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. “It is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.” Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania’s parliament. Protestors had hurled eggs and water bottles at police lines, and at the cars of politicians making their way to the voting chamber. When the police pushed them back with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, the protestors howled in fury, some breaking aloe leaves from the decorative street planting and squeezing the soothing juice into their eyes. “Dictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say ‘fuck you’, because that’s not how you change the country,” Bora told me. “I advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they’re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.”

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zvërnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on a luxury resort project backed by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama’s government. In violent scenes, security guards and villagers clashed, before local protesters broke down the fencing and reclaimed possession of what they say is their land. Who the land in question actually belongs to remains a matter of dispute. Because of the many land reforms and disbursements marking the country’s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime to the chaotic transition to democracy, claims in Albania often overlap. Frequently, more than one party can claim legal title to any given plot.

The ostensible owner of the Zvërnec coastline at the center of the Kushner project, a Miami-based businessman called Artur Shehu, has been accused by lawyers working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was also announced to be under investigation by SPAK, an anti-corruption body set up by Rama’s government, for money laundering and international cocaine trafficking. Shehu, for his part, denies any wrongdoing, insisting he is a legitimate businessman who inherited the land from his medieval forebears. Complicating the story are hints, in SPAK proceedings, of government officials’ attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that “these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities”.
At the same time, SPAK stresses that “at this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities”. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania, filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party to claim high-level political corruption.

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Because the salt lagoon at Zvërnec is a rare European breeding ground for flamingos, the initial protests in Tirana were environmental ones, with festive protesters carrying giant styrofoam flamingos as their emblem. But over the course of the following weeks, the protests escalated from halting construction on the project and reinstating Albania’s recently quashed environmental protection laws, to demanding what is in effect a full revolution against the entire political system. The protesters now insist that Rama must resign and face trial for corruption, along with the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha, while Albania must install a 12-month technocratic government before new elections. Naturally, Rama is not inclined to agree, hence the current standoff.

Though the nightly protests along Tirana’s leafy boulevards are good-natured family affairs, those in the morning are rowdier, bringing along a more committed core of activists who declare themselves to be revolutionaries. While there are young masked men to be seen throwing missiles, and older working-class men wearing the traditional Albanian felt cap or waving the flag of Greater Albania, the majority are from the young, highly-educated and socially liberal Tirana bourgeoisie, as well as the diaspora — ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama’s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting “Rama, hand in your resignation,” in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, or “Rama, Rama, Fuck You,” to the tune of “We Will Rock You”.

Over the days and nights of protests I attended, long and passionate speeches condemned the government as terrorists, as a dictatorship, and bemoaned the claimed sell-out of Albanian land to Israeli interests. The latter, rather conspiratorial, claim transpired to be a regular theme when talking to Albanians. Even stickers observed on lampposts in central Tirana depicted Rama as a stooge of George Soros or as a Hasidic Jew. Xhoana, a fashionably dressed marketing executive, told me: “Our government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don’t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.”

“Albania right now doesn’t need a revolution,” said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. “People have been saying for 50 days we need a revolution, but they have no plan for what comes next. A revolution at this stage, when we are so close to going into the EU, is a dangerous thing.” Rama’s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by rule of law concerns, the country’s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime — particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc’s agency in the new age of geopolitical competition. But the window for accession may be narrow and short-lived. For both the ruling Socialist Party and the EU, this summer’s mass protests are an unwanted complication.

“Europe, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,” Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. “They didn’t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.” A skeptic of Albania’s progress under Rama’s government, which he termed a “narco-state,” ruled by a “klepto-regime”, Pollo told me that “Rama has allowed for the Albanian rings, which bring coke from Latin America to central and northern Europe, to launder their proceeds in construction. And then, I mean, when elections come, they, with their money and their muscle, they help him get the vote.” But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition’s concerns. “Edi Rama is a master in staging things, and organizing, in having summits in Tirana, and having the leaders in some restaurant presenting a pizza, with his face on the pizza box, and then you have the President of the European Commission, saying ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi’.”

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On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn’t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama’s rule, Albania’s GDP has almost tripled in a decade, a growth rate Western Europeans can only envy. New tower blocks, exuberantly designed in the flush of new wealth, loom over Tirana’s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather outré destinations, both Tirana and the country’s many fast-developing beach resorts are now filled with tourists, both northern Europeans seeking summer sun and Turks and Gulf Arabs escaping it. The bustling cafes, bars and restaurants are as stylish and comfortable as anything elsewhere in the Mediterranean, if no longer significantly cheaper. Albanian wages have not kept up with the rapid inflation of prices, particularly of food and property, introduced by the influx of money, legitimate or otherwise. In some ways, Edi Rama appears a victim of his own success.

The protesters are “an urban group of people, predominantly highly educated”, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlorë, including Zvërnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. “The paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we’ve done something right, right?” Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zvërnec ruefully admitted liking. “It’s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We’re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.”

For all the country’s economic success, Albanian political discourse is riven by eyebrow-raising claims of impropriety, emanating most strongly from the opposition. In his office in Democratic Party headquarters, Sali Berisha, the 81-year old leader of the conservative opposition, came out from behind a desk piled high with papers to shake my hand. Behind him, on the cluttered bookshelves, a MAGA baseball cap and framed photograph of Mother Theresa vied for space. Albania’s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country’s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country’s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had lifted the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place — unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being “corrupted” by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country’s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. “If you look to this country,” Berisha asked me rhetorically, “What you will find? You’ll find an extraordinary power in the hands of Edi Rama and his government, which is the power of drugs. The power of drugs is many, many billions of euros. The power of drugs, of Albanian drug cartels, controls everything in this country.”

Recently returned to frontline politics after defeating internal rivals within the Democratic Party, Berisha eyes the protests as a route back to office, or at very least as weakening his bitter rival Rama’s grip on power. He concedes that “maybe 20%” of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by “Left-wing extremist groups”. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, “and their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That’s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.” As for his rival himself, “Edi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,” Berisha told me. “Like being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.”

* * * * *

The Prime Minister’s Office is in a handsome Rationalist building opened in 1941, designed to house the Italian colonial governor. Attendants there ushered me through long corridors, lined with classical Greek and Ottoman ceramics and into Edi Rama’s office, where he pointedly ignored me for some time, busy scrolling on his mobile phone. Rama had been an artist and writer before entering politics as the reformist Mayor of Tirana, whose policy of beautifying the capital had turned it into an Instagrammable tourist destination, and himself into Albania’s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912, surpassed only by the communist dictatorship. A big and powerful-looking man, today dressed all in loose, black clothing, apart from spotless white trainers, the fiercely intelligent Rama is as charismatic as he is intimidating. But recent international interviews had been fraught, making the mood in the office tense. When Rama finally sat down beside me, leaning into his chair, I asked him his opinion of the protests.

“The protests today are not the protests of June, so the people who spoke today are different. They are engaged in political parties. They are engaged in opposition parties, small parties of opposition, Leftists from the extreme and Rightists from the extreme,” he claimed, “While the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.” In any case, “I am very, very proud that we have had such a big protest for days in a most peaceful manner, and that nobody was hurt, nobody was stopped to do what he or she wanted,” he added, “The bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.” Repeating his government’s claim that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that “the algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I’m telling you, one of the things that we have seen from the back of the mirror, the social media, is that a very high percentage of the content is produced outside the building. It’s not Albanian.” Indeed, Rama added, “If this would not have been about Jared Kushner and Trump and Ivanka and all type of fantasies, this would not have been so good for the algorithm,” but the Kushner link “brought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.” When I demurred, he added, “You are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he’s killed flamingos in Albania.”

* * * * *

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zvërnec. “Albania is not a democracy,” an older man told me in the village’s heavily-accented Greek. “They are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,” he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. “We have had no water here for two months. I have to use my little well, but then they take everything we own here for themselves.” A local woman agreed. “They have taken my elderly father’s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won’t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.”

For the birthplace of Albania’s political crisis, Zvërnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlorë, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zvërnec reflects an older, unspoiled Mediterranean, increasingly a nostalgic memory even in Albania. Wading birds hoot and croak in the coastal marshes of the Vjosa delta, cicadas rasp in the olive groves, shaded from the ferocious summer sun: it is all reminiscent of the Greece of maybe 30 or 40 years ago. “We want investment, but not this investment,” one woman told me. “This is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don’t want Israelites here — this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.”

On Zvërnec’s wild sandy beach of Portonovo, empty save for a handful of local families, happily ignoring the notices forbidding them to swim, I met Kosta Xhaho, the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania’s largest environmental NGO. This is, he told me, one of the most important, turtle nesting areas, and Ground Zero for the protests that had long migrated to central Tirana. “We started to protest here. Then we started to fight with those bulldozers that started to construct a road and the trucks in the protected area. And then we started to fight with the security that they put on the fences, and now we are fighting with the government to change the law, so this area is to stay protected forever.”

PPNEA’s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog’s Kingdom of Albania. But it is a highly marketable commodity, just as much for those who have farmed it for generations as for the Kushners. And it is not clear that the villagers themselves wish the site to remain undeveloped, rather than profiting from the tourism boom they believe Shehu has stolen from them. In nearby Vlorë, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. “These people [in Zvërnec] are stupid,” a Vlorë taxi driver told me. “They don’t want to go forward, but it’s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It’ll be so good for our city. I just hope it’s like they say it is, and Israel doesn’t build a base there,” he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests “because they’re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.” I asked him who he voted for. “Rama, of course,” he said, looking at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, “Every time Edi Rama.”

For Rama himself, re-elected just over a year ago for a fourth term, the protests have come as a jolt of shock. In the recently released “Besa” strategic document, whose name alludes to the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama’s government declared that “the flamingo boulevard” presented “a mirror that society held up before us”, and proof that “ever more Albanians, including older ones, no longer compare the Albania we have with the one we had in 2013, but only with the one they themselves believe Albania can and must be”. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville’s observation that the most dangerous moment for any regime is when the rising expectations derived from reforms already undertaken make any residual injustices seem intolerable. “The citizen who has more than yesterday,” the strategy’s authors write, “is a more dissatisfied citizen. Precisely because they live better today than yesterday, they likewise believe that their country is capable of doing far more than it does today.” In a recent open letter, the former Socialist Party insider and Rama loyalist Elisa Spiropali, recently removed from her role as Europe Minister, declared that the protests represent a “political and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.” In what can only be read as a critique of Rama’s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires “not more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals”, “more humility, less arrogance”, “more representation and less concentration of decision-making”, to build “a state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person”.

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali’s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. “This is a very internal, domestic thing,” he said. “And we have to keep it for our own because I don’t think we have to export our internal things outside for the audience, because then it becomes like feeding with curiosity, feeding with curious things, an audience that is not at all inside the story, not informed or nothing.” But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama’s inner circle had attended the Aruba meeting with the alleged drug trafficker Artur Shehu, and that the government had uncomfortable links with organized crime bosses. “Where is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?” he responded. “So how would you answer,” he added, pointing at me, “for example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it’s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it’s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I’m really disgusted from years now that in this country… that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.” Asked about the opposition’s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. “You can say whatever you want. But ‘narco-state’, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn’t match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I’m telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans, to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active in organized crime. Outside. But the industry of the crime is not here. It’s there.”

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, “You know narco-states, I guess, how they feel like, you know corrupt poor countries, how they feel like, you know middle-income countries, how they feel like. I don’t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides… It doesn’t feel unsafe, it doesn’t feel like a poor country, you don’t feel all these things.”

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania’s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. “No, how protests can threaten the legacy?” he said, “I like the pressure.” He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today’s, in 2013, just after entering power, and also in 2018. “When it came to the first one, I pulled back because they were right. They had a very strong point. I said, you are right, we’ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn’t pull back. But I started a conversation with them and we did good things. This time, I learned things, so we are not going to pull back from the [Zvërnec] project, for sure. But we’re gonna make a [consultation] process.” In the end, he added, “I strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.”

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Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia’s strongman Aleksandar Vučić — not, in Albania, a flattering comparison — who has also won the EU’s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama’s children. For nearly a generation, Rama’s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zvërnec, Tirana’s middle classes feel poorer, not richer, for the visible growth and wealth sprouting around them. For Western observers, now accustomed to stagnant wages and the limitations of two-party systems, Albania’s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU’s Balkan waiting-room.

With the protests continuing, contrary to early expectations, through August, the likelihood of their escalation in the cooler weather of autumn, when holidaymakers have returned home and students have returned to classes, appears to be growing. But juggling his attempts to secure the simultaneous approval of EU observers, of the mercurial and acquisitive Trump administration, of the party shaped in his own image and of his increasingly restive voters, Rama projected only calmness. Leaning back into his armchair at the end of our meeting, he told me, “Listen, I am 13 years here now. So I have three more years. I have nothing to prove to myself. Because in the beginning, you know, there are many things to prove to yourself. As you said, I have my place in the history of this country, then, in which light this will be decided by the people.”

But navigating the vagaries of the second Trump administration has increased the pressure on Edi Rama, whose attempts to court favor with the American president, whether by signing up Albania to Trump’s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family’s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama’s only reward, so far, has been Washington’s sudden rehabilitation of his bitterest political rival, Sali Berisha, in what can only be read as a means to exert American pressure. What happens over autumn will now decide everything, Sali Berisha told me. “Very much will depend on September. Will they re-energize, remobilize? Will opposition parties succeed to get united in a large front? To persist for a caretaker government for new elections, or not, I could not predict. It’s difficult, but I think it’s vital.” But the Democratic Party’s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha’s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. “Revolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,” it said, Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana’s streets.