The months-long protests in Albania have reached a new escalation, with university students strengthening their mobilization since mid-October.

Concerns about study expenses, poor employment prospects, and low wages have added impetus to a movement that has demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama and urgent action on the widespread corruption weighing on the country.

“Students have brought the Flamingo Revolution into a new phase,” wrote the Solidarity Albania platform. “In a capital where living costs devour 170% of the median net wage, public universities are starved to force youth into economic exile.”

“When a generation rises for its basic rights, the only legitimate response is total solidarity,” they added.

“Tirana’s struggle stands shoulder-to-shoulder with student strikes in France and India, and with liberation struggles in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, and elsewhere.”

Police violence brings comparisons to protests in France

Mass mobilizations against elite tourism projects, the devastation of Albania’s natural resources, and corruption have been ongoing since May this year – evolving in what was dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. 

For the past months, demonstrations have continued on a daily basis, Enriko Peçuli from the progressive party Lëvizja Bashkë told BreakThrough News. “Some days you saw more people on the streets, sometimes a bit less, but gatherings continued basically every night: the energy was there.”

On October 13, when the latest upsurge began, “you could sense in the city that something was going to happen,” Peçuli adds. When students assembled in large numbers near the Ministry of Education and part of the building caught fire, police violence erupted, Peçuli says – and has continued for ten days in a row.

Read more: Protests banned and curfews declared ahead of next major mobilization in France

The authorities’ violent response has drawn comparisons to the institutional response to youth mobilizations in France, yet it represents a new element in local mobilizations. During other significant demonstrations, including the student protests in 2018, it was not as pronounced, Peçuli says – possibly indicating Rama’s worsening position. 

Ever since the beginning of the protests, the prime minister has tried to deflect responsibility and avoided the protesters’ core demand: his resignation.

When the Flamingo Revolution started, Peçuli describes, Rama tried to blame it on foreign powers. He has named the governments of Greece, Iran, and Russia as culprits for the mobilizations. “It’s only gotten worse with time,” the activist points out. “He’s becoming more and more arrogant, he uses a language of violence.”

“Rage is pushing people into the streets”

After the escalation of the past days, Rama attempted – in a way – to establish dialogue with the students. This was resolutely rejected, as Peçuli notes that protesters will not agree to anything less than the government’s resignation.

“It’s spontaneous rage pushing people into the streets,” he said, nodding to the events’ decentralized character that some have credited for at least part of the demonstrations’ longevity.

“We don’t have trade unions or big student movements [like the ones in France], society is generally not organized in the same way,” Peçuli points out – but there’s no sign of backing down. 

“Rama might have offered dialogue, but it’s difficult to take that seriously after the past 10 days. After you’ve sanctioned breaking people’s heads, your right to call for dialogue is a bit limited.”

The protesters cannot be dismissed as members of some particular social segment, being instead a cross-party movement from all sectors of society.

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Albania has returned to the news in recent days, with protests that eventually culminated in the destruction of the Ministry of Education, but the process that led to this chaos began some months ago because of the negotiations surrounding the construction of a gigantic luxury resort in the country, in a megaproject led by Affinity Partners, owned by Jared Kushner, the Zionist agent who is Donald Trump’s son-in-law and who occasionally acts as his ad hoc diplomat. Alongside Kushner in this project, there was also capital from three Arab petro-monarchies and local investors.

The first point of dissent, the spark, so to speak, of this fire, was the fact that the project would be built in an environmental protection area, in the marshy wetland zone of Albania, which is considered a natural paradise where flamingos, pelicans and other animals nest, some of them endangered. Nevertheless, Kushner obtained authorization from Edi Rama’s government to go ahead with the project, as well as the classification of strategic investor, which allows him to bypass local regulations.

The project itself is expected to reach the sum of 4.7 billion dollars and would be implemented on the island of Sazan (once a military base), on the island of Vjosa-Narta and on the island of Zvernec, which also have defensive characteristics. Kushner supposedly had the “idea” and “discovered” Sazan while traveling on the yacht of his friend Nathan Rothschild, a context in which he also met the Albanian prime minister.

Kushner’s other partners at Affinity Partners are Luis Videgaray, former Minister of Finance of Mexico, and Elad Gil, an Israeli investor, and the project involves the construction of hotels, marinas and private villas, in an effort that seems to point toward a “Dubai-ization” of Albania.

Since June, therefore, when these shady deals were revealed, Albanian citizens began going to the streets to protest, with slogans (“Albania is not for sale”) against Washington and Tel Aviv and calling for Kushner to be made persona non grata. The protests had already been following protests organized in February and March over corruption accusations against Edi Rama, as well as the fact that the Albanian prime minister had begun a campaign to encourage Israelis to move to Albania.

What has been most worrying for the Albanian government is the fact that these protesters cannot be dismissed as members of some particular social segment, being instead a cross-party movement from all sectors of society. And the protests continued, intermittently, until now in October, which points to a permanent dissatisfaction that is difficult to stifle.

The most recent protests are more focused on youth and on new corruption scandals, problems in education and the government’s attempts to “force” entry into the European Union, but the issue of Jared Kushner’s luxury resort remains on the agenda.

It is possible to analyze the case from the conspiracy-minded angle of “Epstein Island,” especially considering the Rothschild family’s ties to Epstein and to Kushner, but perhaps a more interesting angle points to the geopolitics of the Mediterranean and the power project of the State of Israel.

Israel has been expanding its activities in this area and expanding its presence. Israeli investors, for example, have been mass-acquiring properties in Cyprus and in the Greek port city of Kalamata. When we add up these ventures targeting properties in Cyprus, Greece and now Albania, we clearly perceive that there is an eastern Mediterranean focus in Israeli parastatal business activities. It is striking that these always involve islands and ports, which points specifically to the construction of a thalassocratic strategy on the part of the State of Israel.

Also striking is a specific theme of Albanian political-social reality, which is the fact that it has become common practice for Albanian investors, after being legitimized as strategic investors to secure approval for development projects, to resell their shareholdings for negligible amounts to other, more obscure actors. In many cases, we are talking here about “straw man” schemes used by the Albanian mafia. That would not naturally be the case for Kushner or the Arab petro-monarchies, but the suspicion raised affects the Albanian partners in this investment.

Perhaps that is why the violent repression of the protests has drawn less attention than elsewhere. It appears to be the authentic eruption of popular dissatisfaction in a country that for decades has been victimized by corrupt leaders, highly dangerous mafias and brutal terrorists.

Começou em França, em setembro, com os estudantes do secundário na rua. Desde então, juntaram-se-lhes jovens em pelo menos outros sete países europeus. “Estamos fartos de tudo”. Jovens espanhóis e portugueses montaram tendas nas capitais para protestar contra as rendas altas. Franceses e italianos marcharam por melhores condições nas escolas, em manifestações manchadas por saques. Na Grécia, pede-se mais dinheiro para as universidades; na Albânia, os jovens entraram em confrontos com a polícia depois de se juntarem a protestos anti-corrupção contra um governo que acusam de lhes travar o futuro. As exigências mudam de país para país, mas há um