With all eyes on the protests tearing through France, young people clashed with riot police on the seventh day of violent demonstrations in Albania.
Thousands of young Albanians have marched in the streets of the capital, Tirana, this week, calling for the resignation of Edi Rama, the Prime Minister. Police used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons on protesters, who attacked government buildings and banks, set the education ministry on fire, threw stones and pulled up paving stones to hurl at officers.
Their anger is directed at more than their government. The protests follow months of demonstrations against a luxury resort linked to Donald Trump’s family, with thousands first marching against the project in June, carrying signs declaring that their country was not for sale.
The proposed tourism development on Albania’s southern Adriatic coastline, backed by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has become a lightning rod for accusations that political connections and foreign investment are being prioritised over the interests of local communities.
The resort is expected to cost billions of euros, with protesters raising concerns about environmental damage and the lack of transparency surrounding the development. Its association with the Trump family has given the dispute an international dimension, turning a local fight over land into a symbol of who gets to decide a country’s future.
These protests have now escalated into a student-led challenge to Rama, whose government is facing anger over alleged corruption, education costs and poor employment prospects. The prime minister has rejected calls to resign, blaming the rallies on ‘‘foreign hands’’.
Young people in Albania are furious about a system they believe has left ordinary people with little power. “They see that all resources in the country, political resources, economic, everything is in the hands of oligarchs,” political analyst Afrim Krasniqi told Reuters.
Speaking to The i Paper, Dr Roula Nezi, a political science lecturer at the University of Surrey, said that “many countries” were now seeing a wave of young people demonstrating.
“Coming from a political science perspective, we do know that social media can help mobilise people,” said Nezi. “We do know that when you see that a movement or protest in one country is quite successful, especially because of social media, that feeling can give you reassurance, so others elsewhere begin to think ‘if we mobilise as well, we can also be successful’.”
From Italy to India, Gen Z activists are challenging a system they believe serves a small elite, while younger people struggle to secure education, employment and financial stability. Social media has helped make protest movements more visible, allowing footage of demonstrations, police confrontations and speeches to circulate rapidly across borders.
It can also provide people with ways to organise outside traditional political structures, although online mobilisation does not necessarily translate into sustained activism or electoral participation. Research published by the UK Electoral Commission in 2026 found that young people value democracy and want to participate in it, but that opportunities to develop political knowledge and confidence remain uneven.
In the United States, Trump’s presidency has become a focal point for protests against the concentration of political power. Thousands of demonstrators joined the latest “No Kings” rallies on Saturday, opposing what they regard as authoritarian tendencies in the administration and urging voters to participate in November’s midterm elections.
Nadia Urbinati, a political theorist at Columbia University, told The i Paper: “Today, it is much easier to have these international movements at this scale. There is a contamination, an imitation – countries are doing the same thing as each other and seeing that it makes a difference, there is a phenomenon.
“In the US, they are protesting ‘No Kings’ – the same protest that has been taking place for three years. But this is not the same as Europe – this is not a reaction against difficulty, this is to show that elections can change situations.”
Protesters have attempted to turn opposition to the US President into electoral engagement, with the demonstrations taking place against the backdrop of a fiercely contested campaign for control of Congress.
Although Trump’s political style has long relied on confrontation, critics argue that his administration has helped normalise an increasingly aggressive form of discourse, in which opponents are portrayed as enemies and threats of punishment are used as political weapons.
Last week, Trump told an Arizona rally that people who leak military information “should be shot” and called them the “scum of the Earth”.
His administration has also intensified its rhetoric against left-wing movements, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing a shift in counterterrorism priorities towards what he described as far-left threats.
On Sunday, amid political unrest in France, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to post the message, “France is burning!” apparently linking the unrest to “the immigration of people from an entirely different world”.
“Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” he added.
Nezi said that when leaders frame opponents as existential threats, it becomes harder to maintain a shared understanding of democratic disagreement and aggression risks becoming an accepted feature of political life.
When a leader shares a post like Trump’s, she said, they are signalling “‘we don’t want to be like France’, so they close the borders”.
“This basically means it’s a very strong anti-immigration, anti-Muslim show, and he’s very specifically pinpointing towards all the damages that have been happening in Paris, and that it’s because of foreigners, is what he is saying, and we don’t want that here.”
Young people are watching institutions they are told to trust appear increasingly adversarial, polarised and unresponsive.
“What is important is this feeling of pride,” added Nezi. “Young people are the ones that are actually mostly hit. I would say, to a certain extent, about this cost of living crisis and people in my generation, in their forties as well, we do know, and we have seen in surveys that there is this general feeling of resentment, this feeling that, ‘I would not be able to succeed or to build as much as my parents’ generation, even my grandparents’ generation’, so I think that is quite important.
“On the other hand, what we also see is that young people today, they tend not to participate so much in elections, but more in alternative kinds of forms of political engagement like demonstrations and boycotting.”
Kushner’s proposed investment has become a symbol of the proximity between wealth and political influence, and Trump’s presidency an example of what happens when the boundaries between public office and private interests are blurred.
These protests are a striking illustration of growing anxiety about who holds power, who benefits from it and who is left paying the price.