Albania's student-led protests hit sixth day as Rama refuses to step down

Protests against Prime Minister Edi Rama's government entered a sixth straight day in Tirana on Sunday, with demonstrators chanting "Rama, resign" as the Albanian leader rejected calls to quit, TRT World reported.

Albania's health ministry said 272 people had been injured since the unrest began on Tuesday, 169 of them police officers, according to TRT World. The ministry's Sunday morning update put the toll from the most recent clashes at 65 injured, including 37 police officers, with 12 people admitted to hospital.

Escalation over the weekend

Saturday brought the sharpest confrontation so far. Protesters threw projectiles and Molotov cocktails, and a court, banks and a post office were set on fire or damaged, TRT World reported, while police fired rubber bullets for the first time since the protests began. Dozens were hurt that day. On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the Education Ministry.

In a video address, Rama attributed the protests to an "outside hand," according to TRT World. The U.S. Embassy in Tirana called for "restraint and calm on all sides."

From campus grievances to a broader revolt

The demonstrations began with student demands for better conditions at universities, lower tuition fees and action against corruption, according to TRT World. They followed earlier rounds of protest triggered by a resort development linked to the family of U.S. President Donald Trump. Al Jazeera, reporting on Oct. 15 as the protests entered a third day, said protesters also opposed the sale of land on Albania's southern coastline for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, and that the government denies any corruption.

By midweek the protests had spread beyond the capital, and police used water cannon and tear gas, Al Jazeera reported. Police arrested 65 people on Wednesday on suspicion of attacking officers, institutions and property, and Tirana hospitals treated 89 people that day, 61 of them police officers. In a written statement to Reuters cited by Al Jazeera, Rama said: "My responsibility is to listen, address legitimate concerns and keep Albania moving forward." He added: "I will not allow violence to derail Albania's European future." One student told Reuters: "Our prime minister is the meaning of the word corruption."

Rama's Socialist Party won a fourth consecutive term in parliamentary elections in May 2025, and Albania, a NATO member, is negotiating to join the European Union. Unrest has also flared elsewhere in the Western Balkans in recent weeks, as when Kosovo police fired tear gas at protesters over a bill on the Hague-based war crimes court.

What it means: Rama has built his political case on delivering EU membership, and he is now using that same argument to resist the street. The risk for Tirana is that the images Brussels sees are no longer of a reform front-runner but of burning public buildings, rising casualty counts and a government that frames student anger as foreign interference. The split in the injury figures, with police making up most of the casualties, will let the government cast the protests as a public-order problem. But the demands at the core, on tuition, campus conditions and corruption, are domestic and specific, and the coastal resort dispute ties them to questions about who benefits from Albania's development. The longer the standoff runs, the harder it becomes to present the accession process as insulated from the country's internal politics.