Thousands of students, setting fires in the streets and barricading roads with wrought ironwork, brought Albania’s capital to a standstill on Thursday, as anger over the high cost of education coalesced into violent protests demanding the prime minister’s resignation.
The police responded with tear gas and water cannons, arresting dozens and charging nearly a hundred people in all. But little seemed to tamp down the growing pressure on Prime Minister Edi Rama of Albania, as public opposition to a luxury resort project linked to President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner collided with growing discontent over corruption and the rising cost of living.
This week, months of demonstrations over those issues snowballed into violent protests in Tirana, Albania’s capital, where the education costs brought high schoolers, university students and others into the streets.
As they marched to the education ministry and the prime minister’s office, some set fire to trash cans and bus shelters, pelted government buildings and banks with rocks and clashed with the police.
“Albanians have been protesting for more than four months, demanding the prime minister’s resignation, but no one has paid attention to their demands,” said Anila Shehu, a third-year engineering student. “For this reason, we will continue to protest by any means and in any way possible until Rama resigns. Enough is enough.”
The protesters blocked multiple roads, lighting fires and ripping out wrought-iron fencing to use as barricades. Some pulled up concrete blocks from the sidewalk and smashed the windows of buildings linked to the government. They also vented their anger on banks and financial institutions, pelting rocks at them and wrecking A.T.M.s.
The police tried to contain the protests with tear gas and water cannons, and said they had arrested 55 people and charged 98 more with criminal offenses. The health ministry said that 89 people had been injured, including 61 police officers and 18 protesters.
Mr. Rama, who secured a fourth term as prime minister last year when his Socialist Party won a landslide victory, said the student protests had been overtaken by groups who wanted to derail Albania’s plans to join the European Union. On Thursday, he visited the charred ruins of the College of Europe, a postgraduate center training Europe’s future technocrats, with campuses also in Belgium and Poland.
“Anyone who has a hand in this chaos will certainly pay,” he said in a video posted to social media.
After the third straight day of protests on Thursday, dumpsters still smoldered, and some stores and tourist sites remained closed. At a jewelry store at the base of the Maritim Hotel Plaza Tirana, workers covered the windows with paper, bracing for more destruction. Some protesters targeted such buildings, saying the government’s push for a new skyline designed by foreign architects masked its neglect of Albania’s own schools and universities.
“I am not against protest, and the reason is against the prime minister and the government,” said Arian Krypci, the 57-year-old head of administrative security for FiBank, standing in front of a burned branch of his bank near the prime minister’s office.
“But escalating in this way, I don’t like it at all,” he added. “The government will have to make a decision, to resign, to put the police out or the army, because this chaos cannot be endless.”
What began as a student-led protest in support of peaceful demonstrations against the luxury development has grown to include soccer fan clubs and other groups angry at the government, said Emir Lecini, a member of the student group that helped start the protest.
“I cannot say where the protests will go next or what the next step will be, because the situation has become impossible to control,” he said. “Nevertheless, we stand by our demand for Rama’s resignation, and the protests will not stop until he steps down.”
The protests against the Kushner-linked project began after a video circulated online: It showed private security guards on May 30 dragging away a man who had joined a few dozen residents and environmental activists on a beach in southern Albania that Mr. Kushner and his business partners want to be part of a proposed luxury hotel and resort.
Known as the “flamingo revolution,” a nod to the region’s rich bird life, the protests had until this week been largely peaceful, resembling a nightly carnival in Tirana.
To the protesters, the Kushner-linked planned development became a symbol of a system in which self-serving politicians awarded lucrative contracts to friends, at the expense of ordinary citizens. Mr. Rama, who has been in and out of government since 1998, has been the main target of the anger, alongside Sali Berisha, 81, a former prime minister who leads the main opposition party.
Last month, Mr. Rama said the development was on hold while the government assessed how it would affect the surrounding environment. Whether construction on the luxury project will proceed depends on the assessment, he said.
Mr. Rama told Reuters that he would not step down, saying to do so “would be a betrayal of the Albanians who gave me a strong mandate to complete negotiations on European Union membership.”
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