{"id":733,"date":"2026-08-14T23:39:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T23:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=733"},"modified":"2026-08-14T23:39:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T23:39:54","slug":"inside-the-albanian-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=733","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Albanian revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On 16 May 2026, a revolution began in Zv\u00ebrnec, a sleepy village on the Albanian coast where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump planned to build a luxury resort. It spread across the country, as Albanians vented their frustration with a political class accused of corruption and democratic backsliding, headed by Edi Rama, the 13-year prime minister and darling of the European Union.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more How to Nixonmaxx the right way<\/a><\/p>\n

Aris Roussinos\u00a0<\/strong>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\u2019s embattled PM himself \u2014 who believes that his people have never had it so good.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy am I living in England?\u201d 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\u2019s Flamingo Revolution protesters\u00a0from the country\u2019s parliament. \u201cAlbania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn\u2019t be immigrants. We should come back home,\u201d he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now\u00a0entirely depopulated, as everyone who could\u00a0had already decamped to Britain\u00a0or elsewhere in Western Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn\u2019t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you\u2019ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they\u2019ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It\u2019s a really, really corrupted government, and we\u2019ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the 54th and\u00a0most violent day\u00a0so far of\u00a0the street protests that have overshadowed Albania\u2019s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama\u2019s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. \u201cEveryone thinks that this is a democratic state,\u201d Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting \u201cDown with communism!\u201d and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. \u201cIt is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.\u201d Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania\u2019s 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\u00a0police 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. \u201cDictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say \u2018fuck you\u2019, because that\u2019s not how you change the country,\u201d Bora told me. \u201cI advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they\u2019re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zv\u00ebrnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly\u00a0closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on\u00a0a luxury resort project\u00a0backed by\u00a0Trump\u2019s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama\u2019s government. In violent scenes,\u00a0security guards and villagers clashed,\u00a0before 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\u2019s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0ostensible owner of the Zv\u00ebrnec coastline\u00a0at the center of the Kushner project,\u00a0a Miami-based businessman\u00a0called Artur Shehu, has been\u00a0accused by lawyers\u00a0working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was\u00a0also announced to be under investigation\u00a0by SPAK,\u00a0an anti-corruption body set up by Rama\u2019s 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\u2019 attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK\u00a0files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that \u201cthese meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities\u201d.
\nAt the same time, SPAK stresses that \u201cat this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities\u201d. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania,\u00a0filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party\u00a0to claim high-level political corruption.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because the salt lagoon at Zv\u00ebrnec 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\u2019s\u00a0recently 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.<\/p>\n

Though the nightly protests along Tirana\u2019s 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 \u2014 ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama\u2019s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting \u201cRama, hand in your resignation,\u201d in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes\u2019 \u201cSeven Nation Army\u201d, or \u201cRama, Rama, Fuck You,\u201d to the tune of \u201cWe Will Rock You\u201d.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cOur government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don\u2019t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAlbania right now doesn\u2019t need a revolution,\u201d said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. \u201cPeople 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.\u201d Rama\u2019s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by\u00a0rule of law concerns, the country\u2019s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime \u2014 particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc\u2019s 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\u2019s mass protests are\u00a0an unwanted complication.<\/p>\n

\u201cEurope, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,\u201d Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. \u201cThey didn\u2019t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.\u201d A skeptic of Albania\u2019s progress under Rama\u2019s government, which he termed a \u201cnarco-state,\u201d ruled by a \u201cklepto-regime\u201d, Polalo told me that \u201cRama 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.\u201d But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition\u2019s concerns. \u201cEdi 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 \u2018Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn\u2019t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama\u2019s rule, Albania\u2019s 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\u2019s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather\u00a0outr\u00e9\u00a0destinations, both Tirana and the country\u2019s 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\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n

The protesters are \u201can urban group of people, predominantly highly educated\u201d, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlor\u00eb, including Zv\u00ebrnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. \u201cThe paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we\u2019ve done something right, right?\u201d Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zv\u00ebrnec ruefully admitted liking. \u201cIt\u2019s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We\u2019re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We\u2019re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all the country\u2019s 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\u2019s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country\u2019s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country\u2019s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had\u00a0lifted\u00a0the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place \u2014 unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being \u201ccorrupted\u201d by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country\u2019s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. \u201cIf you look to this country,\u201d Berisha asked me rhetorically, \u201cWhat you will find? You\u2019ll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently returned to frontline politics\u00a0after 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\u2019s grip on power. He concedes that \u201cmaybe 20%\u201d of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by \u201cLeft-wing extremist groups\u201d. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, \u201cand their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That\u2019s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.\u201d As for his rival himself, \u201cEdi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,\u201d Berisha told me. \u201cLike being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.\u201d<\/p>\n

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* * * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Prime Minister\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912,\u00a0surpassed\u00a0only 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\u00a0recent international interviews\u00a0had 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d he claimed, \u201cWhile the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.\u201d In any case, \u201cI 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,\u201d he added, \u201cThe bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.\u201d Repeating\u00a0his government\u2019s claim\u00a0that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that \u201cthe algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I\u2019m 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\u2019s not Albanian.\u201d Indeed, Rama added, \u201cIf 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,\u201d but the Kushner link \u201cbrought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.\u201d When I demurred, he added, \u201cYou are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he\u2019s killed flamingos in Albania.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zv\u00ebrnec. \u201cAlbania is not a democracy,\u201d an older man told me in the village\u2019s heavily-accented Greek. \u201cThey are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,\u201d he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. \u201cWe 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.\u201d A local woman agreed. \u201cThey have taken my elderly father\u2019s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won\u2019t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the birthplace of Albania\u2019s political crisis, Zv\u00ebrnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlor\u00eb, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zv\u00ebrnec 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. \u201cWe want investment, but not this investment,\u201d one woman told me. \u201cThis is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don\u2019t want Israelites here \u2014 this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Zv\u00ebrnec\u2019s 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,\u00a0the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania\u2019s 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. \u201cWe started to protest here. Then we started to fight with\u00a0those bulldozers\u00a0that 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

PPNEA\u2019s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog\u2019s 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 Vlor\u00eb, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. \u201cThese people [in Zv\u00ebrnec] are stupid,\u201d a Vlor\u00eb\u00a0taxi driver told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to go forward, but it\u2019s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It\u2019ll be so good for our city. I just hope it\u2019s like they say it is, and Israel doesn\u2019t build a base there,\u201d he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests \u201cbecause they\u2019re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.\u201d I asked him who he voted for. \u201cRama, of course,\u201d he said, looking at me as if I\u2019d asked a stupid question, \u201cEvery time Edi Rama.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Rama himself,\u00a0, the protests have come as a jolt of shock.\u00a0In the\u00a0recently released\u00a0\u201cBesa\u201d strategic document, whose name alludes to\u00a0the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama\u2019s government declared that \u201cthe flamingo boulevard\u201d presented \u201ca mirror that society held up before us\u201d, and proof that \u201cever 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\u201d. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville\u2019s 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. \u201cThe citizen who has more than yesterday,\u201d the strategy\u2019s authors write, \u201cis 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.\u201d In\u00a0a 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 \u201cpolitical and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.\u201d In what can only be read as a critique of Rama\u2019s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires \u201cnot more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals\u201d, \u201cmore humility, less arrogance\u201d, \u201cmore representation and less concentration of decision-making\u201d, to build \u201ca state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person\u201d.<\/p>\n

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali\u2019s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. \u201cThis is a very internal, domestic thing,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we have to keep it for our own because I don\u2019t 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.\u201d But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama\u2019s 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. \u201cWhere is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?\u201d he responded. \u201cSo how would you answer,\u201d he added, pointing at me, \u201cfor example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on, \u201cYeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it\u2019s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it\u2019s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I\u2019m really disgusted from years now that in this country\u2026 that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.\u201d Asked about the opposition\u2019s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. \u201cYou can say whatever you want. But \u2018narco-state\u2019, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019m 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\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, \u201cYou 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\u2019t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides\u2026 It doesn\u2019t feel unsafe, it doesn\u2019t feel like a poor country, you don\u2019t feel all these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania\u2019s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. \u201cNo, how protests can threaten the legacy?\u201d he said, \u201cI like the pressure.\u201d He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today\u2019s,\u00a0in 2013, just after entering power,\u00a0and also in 2018. \u201cWhen 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\u2019ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn\u2019t 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 [Zv\u00ebrnec] project, for sure. But we\u2019re gonna make a [consultation] process.\u201d In the end, he added, \u201cI strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia\u2019s strongman Aleksandar Vu\u010di\u0107 \u2014 not, in Albania, a flattering comparison \u2014 who has also won the EU\u2019s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight\u00a0a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and\u00a0the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama\u2019s children. For nearly a generation, Rama\u2019s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zv\u00ebrnec, Tirana\u2019s 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\u2019s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU\u2019s Balkan waiting-room.<\/p>\n

With the protests\u00a0continuing, 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, \u201cListen, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0signing up Albania\u00a0to Trump\u2019s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family\u2019s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama\u2019s only reward, so far, has been Washington\u2019s 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. \u201cVery 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\u2019s difficult, but I think it\u2019s vital.\u201d But the Democratic Party\u2019s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha\u2019s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. \u201cRevolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,\u201d it said,\u00a0Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana\u2019s streets.<\/p>\n

Read more Why \u2018responsible\u2019 liberals coddle the irresponsible<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 16 May 2026, a revolution began in Zv\u00ebrnec, a sleepy village on the Albanian coast where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump planned to build a luxury resort. It spread across the country, as Albanians vented their frustration with a political class accused of corruption and democratic backsliding, headed by Edi Rama, the 13-year prime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nInside the Albanian revolution - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=733\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inside the Albanian revolution - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On 16 May 2026, a revolution began in Zv\u00ebrnec, a sleepy village on the Albanian coast where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump planned to build a luxury resort. 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