For the past six months, Albania has been the site of intense anti-government protests. Last month, the largely peaceful demonstrations in this tiny Balkan country of 2.7 million people turned violent.
Now every evening the main boulevard in Tirana, the capital, resembles an urban combat zone as young protesters, mostly student-led protesters, clash with riot police. The police fire tear gas and rubber bullets; the protesters hurl Molotov cocktails and stones. Central Tirana displays the scars of these confrontations — shattered glass, broken windows, vandalized public property, wrecked kiosks.
The protest began as a reaction against a luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner. But it has since grown into something approaching an insurgency against the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama. The grievances that fed the unrest are real: corruption, substandard public services and the fear that Albania’s natural patrimony is being sacrificed to politically connected investors. But they are increasingly being hijacked by something sinister.
The seed for the mayhem was planted during a yachting holiday in the summer of 2021, when Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner visited Sazan, a former military island at the entrance to the Bay of Vlore in southern Albania. “Captivated” by the island, they proposed developing it into a luxury resort. The complication: Sazan is state-owned and environmentally sensitive, while the nearby area of Zvernac contains protected wetlands rich in wildlife.
The Kushners met Rama on the yacht one evening.
The project then acquired shape and speed: A pair of Qatar-based billionaires offered initial financing for the $4.4 billion enterprise; the government designated Kushner’s firm a strategic investor, and in March approved a development permit. The title to the land in Zvernec was purchased from an Albanian expat in Miami with a dubious reputation. The Albanian government, hungry for investment, fast-tracked preliminary permissions.”
This is the point at which people began pouring into the streets to rally against what they regarded as the fire-sale of their national treasure. As their numbers multiplied, their discontent broadened. The specific objective of the original protests — to stop the despoilation of Albanian land — erupted into an outburst directed at Rama.
On a recent evening on Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square, Blendi, a 19-year-old student, told The Post that he had no choice but to protest. He was five when his father moved to Greece for work and he grew up with his mother. “I have no choice but to protest for my future,” he said.
But Blendi and his legitimate complaints were being eclipsed by others who were animated by noxious conspiracism. A short distance from the main square, I met young protesters who brandished posters demanding that the police “arrest the traitor of the nation who sold Albania to the Jews.”
Alas, that is not a fringe feeling. Protester after protester asserted to me that Rama was put in office by “Jews” on — as one student put it — a “20-year contract” to hand Albania to “the Jews.”
Rama — who is now being cast as an authoritarian by European states that would never brook the destruction of public property in their cities — is unapologetically philosemitic. He is also opposed to chauvinism. Rather than temper his views to meet the public mood, he has repeatedly asserted them, even likening Albanian nationalists who speak of Jewish influence and foreign contamination to Nazis.
I have never met Rama, but I am bewildered by European liberals who complain about the rise of extreme nationalism in one breath and castigate Rama in the next for refusing to submit to them.
Most evenings, Rama places empty chairs outside his office, a symbolic invitation to the protesters for talks. Rather than dialogue, he has received an ultimatum: Quit or watch Albania burn. Whatever else this is, it is not democratic. No Western leader would abide a demand for resignation enforced through street violence. Every democracy has problems; no democracy can survive if the ballot box is bypassed. Rama, who first came to power in 2013, won a fourth consecutive parliamentary election last year.
When he first entered office, Albania’s economy stood just above $12 billion. Today, it is around $30 billion. Unemployment was nearly 16%. Today, it is 8%. Corruption and organized crime remain a constant malady, but Albania’s progress is not trivial. Once Europe’s most isolated police state, it has made impressive strides in its EU accession negotiations, though its goal of full membership — Rama’s overarching ambition — will be harder to achieve if political chaos persists.
The protests have become a vehicle for a variety of forces seeking to bring down the government. Among them are members of the extreme left, whose position is clear: They see capitalism as the wrong means to uplift people.
Then there are elements of organized crime who fear, if not extinction, then a serious blow should the country modernize to meet the standards required for membership of the EU.
Finally, there are forces loyal to Sali Berisha, the opposition leader sanctioned by the US for corruption. At 82, Berisha, who haunts Albanian politics like a tapeworm, still harbors hopes of staging a comeback.
Albania’s future will be determined by whether it chooses democratic means or violence to resolve its differences. Rama has offered dialogue. His opponents refuse to explore it. Washington, which enjoys enormous goodwill in Albania, should make it plain that accountability and legitimacy are inextricable — and neither can survive if the ballot is subordinated to the mob.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
