By Sunday evening the first floor of Tirana’s Police Station No. 3 was in flames. Masked groups had bombarded the building with petrol bombs, fireworks and rocks, and ten officers on duty there were hurt, according to State Police chief Skender Hita. Afterwards he drew a sharp line, saying that storming a police building had nothing to do with legitimate protest.
It was the sixth straight day of clashes in the Albanian capital. Earlier, hundreds of young people had again massed outside the education ministry, demanding that the head of government, Edi Rama, step down. Riot police answered with tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets, and Skanderbeg Square, the city’s central plaza, turned into a running battleground. Shopkeepers pulled down metal shutters, while municipal crews dug up loose paving slabs so they could not be thrown.
The human cost keeps rising. Hospitals treated 28 injured people on Sunday alone, most of them police officers but also four passers-by, a journalist and a teenage demonstrator. Health officials put the total since Tuesday at 272 wounded, 169 of them from the police.
What began in May as a campaign against a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, nicknamed the “flamingo revolution”, has become a broad revolt led by students. They want affordable tuition, decent universities, jobs and an end to corruption.
Rama, in power since 2013 and now serving a fourth term, shows no sign of yielding. In a live stream he insisted his government was not under threat, hinted at a “foreign hand” behind the violence and framed the unrest as a threat to the country’s European future, asking citizens to decide between chaos and the EU. Tirana hopes to join the bloc by 2030. He says he is willing to talk about study costs, but wants those who caused damage punished.
Neither side seems ready to blink, and few in Tirana dare to predict what Monday will bring.
