The Albanian masses have been on the streets for almost five months. Protests started in May when it became known that the prime minister, Edi Rama, was more than willing to give away a nature reserve on the beautiful Adriatic coast to foreign developers. Since then, there have been massive, peaceful protests every day in the capital, Tirana. In the last week protesters were joined by students who walked out from the universities, with their own demands for better and more affordable education and better job prospects after graduation.
Students have brought about a new, angrier dynamic to the protests. There is more urgency and more violent clashes with the police. The protesters are throwing stones at the police and set fire on the Ministry of Education, the High Court, other government buildings, and banks, while the police are using tear gas and water cannons. Police have arrested hundreds of people.
The anger is not surprising, after five months of patient marches through the city and after seeing radical student protests in many European countries in the last few weeks, it was only a matter of time when Albanian students would organise and take the next step on their own. Student protests have spread to other cities. They have the same grievances as all European (and world) youth, and much worse as Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe, together with her Balkan neighbours.
Albania came out of Enver Hoxha’s ultra-Stalinist rule in the 1990s as the poorest of all eastern European countries. The “shock therapy” that went along with the brutal restoration of capitalism, with crushing the state industry, mass privatisations and plunder of the state-owned property, and at the same time removal of any securities that people had in terms of housing, jobs, health and education, led to very few becoming very rich and the majority of people being thrown into destitution. One million people have left Albania since then, about a third of the entire population!
Student demands for lower university fees, and more available jobs at the end of it, are only part of the demands against the high cost of living, in general. Housing, for example, in Tirana, and other cities, is completely unaffordable to most people. But in a country with such high emigration, the student demands also mean that young people are determined to stay and build their lives at home. They are demanding a future in Albania.
This demand is coupled with the main slogan of the five-months-long “flamingo revolution” – that “Albania is not for sale”. A luxury tourist resort on the Albanian coast is a project dreamt up by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, whose company is responsible for some equally controversial developments around the world. A nature reserve chosen for its beauty, and which is a breeding place for flamingos and sea turtles, is an area that local people always regarded as their own and now find it shocking that a prime minister can give it away to foreign interests. For people who previously lived in a system, even if otherwise oppressive, but where foreign capital had no way of entrance and where the idea that people own the land and resources was real, it is quite difficult to understand that what they are now seeing is normal functioning of the capitalist system. Instead, they put it down solely to the government corruption, which for sure exists, as capitalism makes rules to suit big business interests. There is still an idea that in Albania (and in similar countries) it is not “proper” capitalism, which supposedly exists in the EU and other “developed” countries. The main demand from all protests is the resignation of Edi Rama, who as another authoritarian ruler is ironically even seen as a continuation of the “communist” rule.
“Good capitalism”
This illusion in “good capitalism” can be seen in calls for the EU to react against Rama, as Albania is a candidate for EU membership. The EU has not reacted, apart from making an occasional noise about “democracy” or “de-escalation.” Yet the capitalist-club EU certainly does not want a country in Europe that is genuinely democratic and where ordinary working people are in charge. The non-responsiveness of the EU, together with student and working-class protests shaking the EU from within, should make it clear that an idea of “good capitalism” is just an illusion. Albania, like many other dependent capitalist countries, is up against bigger powers. This is the same in almost all Balkan countries. In Serbia, there has been a long struggle against the “eco-colonialism” of the EU and the mining company, Rio Tinto, in their rush for lithium for electric cars, and almost as long running an anti-government student movement.
Albanian prime minister Edi Rama is still vowing that he will remain in power. He knows that he is not under pressure to resign from the EU leaders, yet. Like many heads of unpopular regimes who lose all reasonable arguments, he is also claiming that “foreign interests” are behind the protests; a ludicrous statement from someone who serves the interest of foreign capital against his Albanian people. Edi Rama attacked the protesters in a speech at the recent UN General Assembly. There he even threw an accusation of “antisemitism” at the protesters (Kushner is Jewish). In a latest extraordinary video, the Albanian prime minister insults the protesters as a “jealous, violent mob” who are a threat to the country’s path into the EU.
None of this will save Rama. When majority of people rise against a regime it is only a question of time when it will fall. The question is what comes next. The desire to live in a truly democratic country, free from corruption, where people make democratic decisions about their land, resources and economy, will lead to a conclusion among growing parts of the population that this is only possible in a socialist society. That socialist society will have very little in common with the “communist” rule of Enver Hoxha, who presided over an oppressive Stalinist bureaucratic system. A genuinely socialist society would see the economy planned by the democratic control and management of the working class. Such a transformation would be an inspiration for working class people throughout the region to follow.