Police Fire Rubber Bullets as Albania’s Student Revolt Reignites

Rosa Liebknecht

Oct 24

3 min read

Albanian riot police fired tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets at student-led protesters in Tirana on Saturday, October 24, as a movement born in the country’s schools and universities again challenged Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government in the streets.

The confrontation began around 2 p.m. outside the Education Ministry. Protesters threw stones at officers and set fire to the entrance of the Agriculture Ministry. Police drove the crowd away, but demonstrators scattered through central Tirana rather than abandoning the action. Fires also broke out near government buildings as the wider anti-government opposition joined the students.

The Associated Press reported that authorities deployed 2,500 officers across the capital. That is not the posture of a government facing a routine campus dispute. It is the posture of a state trying to contain a political crisis whose grievances now stretch from tuition fees and crumbling education to unemployment, corruption and the concentration of power.

Students have demanded lower tuition, better university conditions and greater public investment in education. Many have also adopted the broader call for Rama to resign. The Socialist prime minister has governed Albania since 2013 and won a fourth term last year. The unrest now represents the strongest sustained challenge to his rule.

Fireworks explode above an anti-government student protest in Tirana, Albania, on October 24, 2026 — Fireworks explode during an anti-government student protest in Tirana on October 24, 2026. Reuters/Florion Goga.

Rama said Saturday that his government was preparing a response to the students’ demands and invited them to dialogue. He also warned that people who used violence would face penalties. The offer came after more than a week of clashes in which protesters hurled rocks, fireworks and firebombs while police answered with batons, gas, water cannon and, on Saturday, rubber bullets.

That cycle cannot be reduced to the government’s preferred story of public order. Violence against people and public buildings deserves scrutiny. So does the political choice to meet an education revolt with thousands of armed officers before delivering material concessions to the students who built it.

“Albanians have woken up,” 28-year-old protester Daniel Tahiri told Reuters. He described the government as a “dictatorship with the clothes of democracy.” Another protester, Orgeta Likaj, said people wanted Rama to understand that corruption and scandal had exhausted his mandate in their eyes.

The October revolt did not appear from nowhere. Months of largely peaceful demonstrations opposed a luxury coastal development backed by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump. That fight over land, access and political privilege helped turn simmering frustration into a broader argument about who Albania’s economy serves.

Now the students have widened that argument. Their demands expose an old divide familiar far beyond Albania: governments promise integration, investment and growth while younger workers face high costs, thin public services and weak prospects. Officials point to development statistics. Students point to the classrooms, bills and jobs that shape daily life.

Albania’s bid to join the European Union sharpens the stakes. Rama has argued that violent unrest threatens the country’s European path. But accession cannot become a shield against domestic accountability. A government that invokes European democratic standards must also tolerate organized dissent, investigate police force and answer social demands with more than riot-control hardware.

The movement also carries a danger of its own. Arson and attacks on journalists or bystanders can isolate protesters from the public they need. A revolt gains power when it turns anger into organization, not when masked individuals provide the state with a pretext for blanket repression.

Saturday’s scenes showed both sides of that struggle: a government relying on overwhelming force and a movement fighting to keep its political purpose visible through smoke and confrontation.

The decisive question is no longer whether the protests will embarrass Rama. It is whether Albania’s students can force education, corruption and economic exclusion onto the national agenda—and whether the government will answer citizens before it answers them with another water cannon.