The Price of Remaining in the Crowd, by Simon Pearson – 26 October 2026

As protests spread across Europe, Albania’s proposed crackdown shows how far a government may go to make political dissent personally costly.

This is a story that will pass most people by. Albania seldom occupies much space in the British press, and events in Tirana are unlikely to compete with the demonstrations filling the streets of Paris, Milan or Lisbon. Yet what the Albanian government announced on Sunday deserves considerably more attention than it will probably receive. As protests over living costs, housing and public services grow across Europe, Edi Rama’s government has offered a particularly disturbing indication of how far a state may be prepared to go when people challenge its authority. Some of his proposals target violence, as governments are entitled to do. Others could make the decision to remain at a demonstration expensive, while a police investigation might follow someone well beyond the square in which they protested.

On 25 October, Rama presented six proposed legal and administrative measures to combat what he calls urban violence and anarchy. They include financial penalties, tighter restrictions on gatherings, new criminal offences and disciplinary measures for schoolteachers. Most troubling is a police-administered electronic register of people referred to prosecutors or placed under investigation for offences against the state, public order or public security. Information could be passed to foreign authorities, accommodation providers and transport companies. These are proposals, not a fully implemented regime: the legal texts and safeguards have still to be examined. The detail already published, however, is enough to raise serious questions about the government’s intentions.

The immediate background is a wave of student-led demonstrations that have spread beyond Tirana. Students have challenged the quality and cost of education, the shortage of opportunities available to young people and the corruption they believe shapes public life. University lecturers have joined them. Some protests have become violent. Reuters reported attacks on public buildings, broken shop windows and confrontations with police; security forces have used tear gas and other crowd-control measures. Shops have suffered genuine damage, and individual officers and protesters have been injured. These facts matter. They do not, however, justify turning everyone who remains in the vicinity of violence into someone liable for a severe financial penalty. Rama has been prime minister since 2013 and secured a fourth term in 2025. His Socialist Party has presided over a development model heavily dependent on private investment, tourism and the promise of European integration. Growth has not removed the pressures that send young Albanians abroad in search of work or leave families struggling to pay for education. Earlier protests against luxury development on the southern coast, including a project associated with Jared Kushner’s investment interests, exposed another conflict over the direction of that development. The student movement has different immediate demands. Both have challenged decisions about land, opportunity and public priorities made at some distance from those who live with their consequences.

The electronic register gives the new package its most alarming character. Under Rama’s published description, a person could be entered because they had been referred to prosecutors or were under investigation. A conviction would not be required. Border officials could consult the register when exercising existing powers to stop people believed to be evading criminal proceedings from leaving Albania. The government also envisages notifying foreign authorities, hotels and transport operators of people it assesses as presenting a risk to security or public order. An entry would not automatically trigger a travel ban, and Rama says significant restrictions would be subject to judicial scrutiny. The distinction matters, but it leaves a more basic problem unresolved: information that can affect how a person is treated outside the criminal courts may be circulated before the allegation itself has been proved.

For Albanians who work, study or visit family abroad, that possibility carries particular weight. Suppose someone is investigated after a demonstration but never charged. Who decides whether their name should be disclosed to a hotel or airline? When would the information be corrected or erased? The government has not published answers that make these safeguards clear. Its proposals concern administrative decisions, but those decisions could reach into the ordinary business of earning a living and moving between countries. Police suspicion could acquire a practical force that a court had never authorised as punishment. The breadth of the categories compounds the problem. Offences against the state, public order and public security cover conduct of widely differing seriousness. They do not all involve violence. Much will depend on the evidence needed for registration, who can challenge an entry and whether appeals can take place before data are shared. These are matters that ought to be settled before the police gain control of the system. When the consequences of an allegation can begin before a trial, correcting an error afterwards may come too late to undo it.

The financial provisions work in a more immediate way. Rama proposes a maximum fine of 500,000 lek for someone who remains at a gathering where violence or destruction is occurring after police have warned people to leave. His government insists liability would rest on individual conduct and expressly exempts journalists, medical staff, observers and passers-by. Yet the conduct it proposes to punish includes staying in a crowd, rather than personally breaking a window or attacking an officer. In the confusion of a demonstration, a warning may be impossible to hear or difficult to obey safely. The difference between someone participating in violence and someone who does not leave quickly enough becomes a matter of police judgement with very large financial consequences.

The penalty is particularly severe when measured against Albanian wages. The maximum proposed fine of 500,000 lek is equivalent to ten months of the statutory minimum gross wage, set at 50,000 lek a month from January 2026. Under Rama’s proposals, a teenager who remains at a demonstration after a police warning that violence is taking place could leave their parents facing that liability, even without having personally committed any violence. For a family already struggling to meet the cost of education, the consequences could be considerable. The government would effectively be transferring responsibility for discouraging political participation into the household itself. Parents would have to weigh their children’s right to demonstrate against the possibility of a financial penalty they could spend years paying off.

Albania’s constitutional history makes the proposed fines harder to dismiss as an ordinary public-order adjustment. On 4 May 2021, the Constitutional Court struck down language in Article 262 of the Criminal Code that made organising or joining a gathering without prior permission a criminal offence. The judges distinguished notification from police authorisation. People exercising the right to assemble were required to notify the authorities under the relevant law; they were not required to secure the police’s permission to exercise the right itself. Five years later, Rama’s announced package again uses the language of an unauthorised gathering and proposes penalties for participating in one. The eventual wording will determine whether the new measures repeat the constitutional defect, but the government cannot simply ignore what its own highest constitutional court decided.

Rama claims European authority for his approach. He says the proposals draw on measures used in France and Italy, Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and judgments of the Strasbourg court. But the European Court of Human Rights’ guidance on freedom of assembly recognises that isolated acts of violence do not automatically strip a peaceful participant of protection because someone else in the crowd behaves violently. There can be lawful restrictions, and people who deliberately commit violence can be prosecuted. What the state must establish is why interference with a particular person’s rights is necessary and proportionate. A large fine imposed for continued presence at a demonstration presents a very different question from punishment for an act of violence that can be proved.

Nor does the evidence so far inspire confidence in the institutions that would administer these powers. On 20 October, Albania’s Ombudsman’s Office published preliminary findings from visits to police stations and detention facilities after the demonstrations of 19 October. At one station, five detained minors alleged physical and verbal abuse by officers. Inspectors observed signs of injury on two of them. Other complaints concerned force used during arrests and demands that detained people unlock their telephones without judicial authorisation. These accounts remain under investigation, and allegations should not be mistaken for findings against individual officers. Some procedural failures, however, were directly observed by the inspectors. Six minors at one station had been entered in a register intended for adults. Several had not been given the proper information about their rights. Officers reportedly lacked visible identification numbers, and inspectors identified deficiencies in detention procedures. Such failures are not peripheral details when the government proposes an additional database of political suspects. A police system that has not consistently followed existing rules for recording minors is a questionable institution to entrust with information that may be transmitted abroad. The right to challenge a restriction afterwards offers limited protection if personal information has already been circulated and an opportunity to travel or work has been lost.

The government’s proposals arrive as the movement develops a relationship with organised labour. On 21 October, the Union of University Employees of Albania announced a teaching boycott in solidarity with the students. It called for an independent investigation into allegations of police violence and urged university managers not to discipline those participating. That matters because lecturers have the capacity to interrupt the normal operation of the universities, adding pressure that street demonstrations alone may struggle to sustain. It also makes the dispute harder to present as the behaviour of a handful of isolated troublemakers. One element of Rama’s package would allow disciplinary sanctions against pre-university teachers who use their professional authority to encourage or organise the attendance of under-eighteens at demonstrations. The proposal concerns schoolteachers and minors; it should not be conflated with the university lecturers’ boycott. Rama says teachers would remain free to protest in their own capacity. Still, the timing is revealing. As students and educators begin acting together, the government is seeking greater authority over the relationship between schools and political mobilisation. It proposes to define the boundary between protecting children and discouraging them from participating in public life, with disciplinary power resting in the institutions that employ their teachers.

There are, of course, workers on the other side of the immediate damage. A café destroyed during a riot may represent a family’s entire investment. Employees can lose wages when premises close. Rama proposes compensation covering between 70 and 100 per cent of eligible losses suffered by smaller businesses, an intervention that could provide genuine relief. The difficulty is that his package links compensation for proven damage to penalties against people whose personal responsibility for that damage has not been established. A state can protect shopkeepers without treating a demonstrator who has not left quickly enough as financially answerable for the actions of somebody else.

In his speech, Rama described opposition-party activity, Antifa extremists and foreign interference as forces behind the disorder. He even alleged that masked provocateurs had travelled from Spain to commit violence for payment. The government’s published statement provides no substantiating evidence for that particular allegation. It presents a familiar political picture: the government speaks for national progress and Europe, while people confronting it are recast as a threat to the country’s future. Rama acknowledges legitimate grievances and promises that the forthcoming budget will address the needs of ordinary families. Those promises sit alongside proposals that would make organising around those same grievances more dangerous. His appeal to European integration makes the contrast more pointed. Albania seeks membership of a European Union that regularly invokes judicial independence, fundamental rights and the rule of law when assessing candidate countries. The proposed register should therefore concern Brussels as much as Tirana. If people under investigation can be labelled dangerous to foreign authorities and private service providers without a conviction, European governments and institutions need to know what evidence supports those labels and what safeguards protect the individuals concerned. The promise of joining Europe is a strange defence for creating new obstacles to moving around it.

Albania is not alone in turning to coercive measures when protests become disruptive. France has expanded policing operations during demonstrations over living standards and public services; Italy has sent additional soldiers onto Milan’s streets; housing campaigners in Portugal and Spain have faced police interventions while attempting to organise beyond occasional marches. The movements differ in their demands and tactics, and the legal powers exercised by their governments are not identical. The common issue is how states respond when collective action begins to interfere with the conduct of ordinary politics. Some concessions are offered, often grudgingly. At the same time, governments search for ways of controlling the disruption without addressing the conditions that produced it.

Albania’s proposal deserves attention precisely because the machinery looks so administrative. There need be no general prohibition on demonstrations. A police officer issues a warning, a family receives a fine, or a name enters a register that may be consulted somewhere else months later. Each decision can be presented as an ordinary application of the rules. Taken together, they could make the exercise of a political right increasingly dependent on whether someone can afford the possible consequences. The state would retain its formal guarantees while altering the conditions under which people can make use of them. This is why a story from Tirana matters beyond Albania. The political danger lies in the gap between a right written into law and the practical freedom to exercise it. When discontent grows, the response need not be an outright ban on protest. It may be a bill sent to a parent, a travel difficulty arising from an unresolved investigation or a teacher threatened with dismissal for helping young people organise. Rama’s measures have yet to acquire their final legal form. That is an argument for examining them now, before powers introduced in the name of exceptional disorder become part of the ordinary machinery of government.

This article first appeared on Anti-Capitalist Musings and is republished here with permission.

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