In an exclusive interview with Truth Times, Albania’s opposition leader hails the youth-led demonstrations as the country’s most significant uprising since the fall of communism — as he demands Prime Minister Edi Rama’s immediate resignation and alleges the authorities tried to paint the protests as antisemitic.
Albanian opposition leader Sali Berisha has described his country’s youth-led demonstrations as “the most important movement of the last 35 years,” ranking them alongside the uprising that brought down the communist dictatorship in the 1990s. In an exclusive interview with Truth Times, the Democratic Party (DP) chief demanded that Prime Minister Edi Rama, whom he says has “no legitimacy” to govern, resign immediately in favour of a non-partisan caretaker government. Berisha also condemned police violence against demonstrators, dismissed claims of foreign interference behind the unrest, and alleged the authorities attempted to manufacture an antisemitic image for the movement. His message to the protesters was unambiguous: “Never stop!”
Why the protests began
The demonstrations were initially sparked by plans for large-scale tourism development in the protected Zvërnec–Vjosa-Narta coastal landscape, including a project linked to an investment by Jared Kushner. Protesters argued the plans threatened environmentally protected areas, including important flamingo habitats, while also raising concerns over transparency, property rights and the approval process. Anger intensified after a peaceful protester was dragged away by private security at the site — in the presence of state police — and the area was sealed off with barbed wire.
Berisha said Rama had originally presented the project as an agreement between private landowners to develop their property with a private investor. He insisted his own position had remained consistent throughout: he and the Democratic Party welcome foreign direct investment “on the sole condition that it complies with the law” — a stance he said he first adopted three years ago when the Kushner investment was announced, and repeated word for word on the day the protests began.
“This stance does not change,” he said.
Exclusive to Truth Times: This interview is original reporting by Truth Times. Publishers wishing to quote or reference this interview should credit Truth Times as the original source and include a backlink to this article.
What sparked the protests
What changed instead, he argued, was what the protest brought to light: unresolved ownership disputes and active lawsuits filed by local residents, and the involvement of public land whose exact surface area, and the terms under which it was granted to the investor, remain unknown. Farmers in the area were engaged in legal disputes over property, he said — disputes Rama knew about but had completely ignored.
Berisha set out the legal position as he sees it: a development or construction permit should only be granted once the investor has purchased the land on the basis of original state title deeds and no ownership disputes are active. Where claims emerge later in that scenario, the law obliges the state — not the investor — to compensate any owner who prevails in court at market value. Instead, he alleged, Rama granted development and even construction permits while the litigation was still ongoing, and the permits ignored Zvërnec’s status as a protected natural landscape under Albanian law, the EU’s Natura 2000 framework and the Habitats and Birds Directives, as well as the Aarhus Convention’s requirement to inform the local community. “In my assessment, he misinformed the investors,” Berisha said.
Berisha said he strongly condemned the dragging of the peaceful protester by private security at the site, in the presence of state police, as well as the fencing of the area with barbed wire. Rama, he said, has acted while completely disregarding both domestic and international law, behaving like a sultan of past centuries who considers “the land, water, and air to be his personal property.”
“This is why I and the DP fully support the protest,” he said.
Protester being dragged away by private security firm after peaceful protest in Zvernec Albania
The antisemitism allegation
On the question of antisemitism, Berisha accused the government of attempting to manufacture an antisemitic image for the protest movement, telling Truth Times that “substantial evidence” points to official efforts to push the demonstrations in that direction. He highlighted the tearing of a flag at the Israeli Embassy — an act for which police have never named a suspect — as grounds for “serious suspicions” that the authorities orchestrated it themselves, and insisted the movement “was not, and is not, antisemitic.”
At the centre of Berisha’s claim is that single unresolved incident: a flag torn at the Israeli Embassy during the unrest. Weeks on, he noted, the police have still not released the identity of the person responsible — a silence he finds impossible to square with a force that has otherwise moved swiftly and forcefully against demonstrators.
“This raises serious suspicions that it was an act orchestrated by the authorities themselves,” Berisha told Truth Times. In his account, the episode fits a deliberate strategy: with the protests drawing sympathy at home and abroad, tarring them as antisemitic would isolate the movement internationally and hand the government a pretext for its crackdown.
He stressed that the protesters themselves left no ambiguity about where they stood. Representatives of the movement condemned the flag-tearing immediately, he said — a response he cited as evidence that the demonstrations have nothing in common with the label being attached to them.
Masked protester tearing down Israeli Flag
Police response
The alleged image campaign, Berisha argued, has run in parallel with physical force. He condemned what he called “savage” police violence against peaceful demonstrators on Thursday 2 July. While conceding that protesters threw eggs and flour at MPs’ passing cars, he said the response was brutally disproportionate: batons, punches and kicks — including blows to the head — beatings inside police vehicles while detainees were handcuffed, and the use of tear gas, bear spray and water cannon.
Here too, he alleged fabrication. The police, he claimed, sent 18 supposedly injured officers to hospital to justify the crackdown; in reality, he said, none had sustained genuine injuries and all returned directly to the protest site. He demanded the immediate release of detained demonstrators.
He also raised the case of young protester Niko Qarkaj, who according to his family suffers from epilepsy. Berisha said Qarkaj was mistreated and arrested, taken to hospital after his condition worsened in custody, then released the following day — whereupon he returned to the protest and made friendly gestures towards the officers.
Protester Niko Qarkaj
Part of a wider campaign to discredit the movement
Berisha placed the antisemitism allegation within what he described as a broader effort by Rama to delegitimise the protests rather than answer them. The prime minister has publicly branded demonstrators as assets of Iranian, Russian or Greek intelligence and declared Albania to be in a “hybrid war” — claims Berisha dismissed out of hand.
“Dictators, whether totalitarian or authoritarian, never blame themselves,” he said, insisting the movement was “entirely triggered and driven by the discontent of youth and citizens” reacting against what he called a corrupt and oppressive regime.
He accused Rama of hypocrisy on the Iran charge in particular, recalling that the prime minister once declared a woman persona non grata merely for appearing in a photograph with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at an international religious event — while, Berisha claimed, Rama was himself received by Ahmadinejad at a Socialist International meeting in Tehran.
For Berisha, the smear tactics betray what he called an “old Stalinist mindset” rooted in Rama’s family history within the communist-era elite. His father, Berisha said, was a deputy to Nexhmije Hoxha and a member of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly, and signed off on the public hanging of the poet Havzi Nela on 10 August 1988 over verses dedicated to human rights — an act for which Rama has never apologised to the Nela family.
Exclusive to Truth Times: This interview is original reporting by Truth Times. Publishers wishing to quote or reference this interview should credit Truth Times as the original source and include a backlink to this article.
The deeper grievances
Environmental issues, Berisha stressed, are “just one aspect” of the protest. Beyond Zvërnec, he pointed to deeper grievances driving what he called the most powerful civic revolt since the 1990s: corruption at the highest levels, elections that international observers including OSCE/ODIHR, PACE and the European Parliament have found to be held under “State-Party” conditions, the emigration of more than 45% of the population between 2014 and 2024 — 1,099,000 citizens to the Schengen zone alone, by Eurostat figures he cited — and growing poverty, with the region’s lowest wages and food prices he put at 20% above the EU average.He also pointed to what he described as the deterioration of education, healthcare and other public services as another major factor driving public anger.
The ‘Red Book’ of secret projects
Berisha tied Zvërnec to what he alleges is a far larger pattern, citing a recently published volume titled Albanian File — with a foreword by Rama himself — cataloguing 532 projects in the country’s most scenic coastal and mountain regions, designed by 60 foreign architecture studios. Aside from Rama and those who commissioned and paid for the projects — at a total cost Berisha put at between €1.5 billion and €2 billion — no one in Albania knows anything about them, he said. Many, he alleged, sit in protected areas that were removed from the protected-areas registry by executive decision after the designs were completed.
Among them, Berisha singled out the Gjipe Canyon project. The canyon — which he described as one of the 20 most unique in the world, holding category-one protection status — has, he alleged, become the property of Rama’s family through forged documents: without a single cadastral record proving ownership, and with no evidence that the 220,000 square metres were ever confiscated by the former communist state. Atop the canyon, he said, a glass hotel has now been placed.
‘The first and only narco-state in Europe’
Berisha’s most sweeping charge was that Rama has built “the first and only narco-state in Europe.” Albania, he claimed, is today the primary exporter of cannabis to the continent, while Albanian cocaine cartels serve as the main transporters of the drug from Latin America to Europe and major stakeholders in the European market — controlling, by his account, over 63% of the market in the UK. The direct links between the Albanian government, and Rama personally, and these cartels have been “definitively proven,” he asserted.
He connected the claim back to the 532 secret projects: investigate their transactions, owners and developers, he predicted, and it will become clear that Rama has treated Albania as his private fiefdom — and handed that fiefdom, projects included, to the Albanian drug cartels. These are among the gravest allegations levelled by the opposition leader; none has been established in court, and the government has consistently rejected them.
‘No legitimacy to govern’
Berisha’s case for resignation rests on a legitimacy argument he set out at length. He compared Rama to Tunisia’s ousted president Ben Ali, alleging that the prime minister secured his fourth mandate by arresting the leaders of the two main opposition parties during an election year while investigations were pending, placing the leader of the third opposition party under criminal prosecution, and violating both domestic law and international electoral principles.
Rama further lacks legitimacy, Berisha argued, because he, members of his family and his closest ministers — “such as Balluku” — face heavy corruption accusations, and because he used the votes of his MPs to block the prosecution from arresting them. In every official action, Berisha said, the prime minister pursues a policy of anti-transparency, relying on “mafia-style codes of conduct rather than transparency.”
His prescription for the crisis is unchanged: Rama’s resignation and a non-partisan caretaker government to prepare free and fair elections.
‘Never stop’
Berisha said the DP has deliberately declined to lead the protest, with members joining “simply as citizens” without party symbols, while its MPs table amendments in parliament reflecting the demonstrators’ demands. Those demands — five in total, made publicly three times by the protest’s representatives — are all directed against Rama and his government, he said: they call for the government’s resignation, the creation of a non-partisan caretaker administration to lead the country to elections, and the reversal of laws voted through by Socialist MPs over the opposition of Democratic Party MPs.
Of the chants heard from the crowds, he said 85–90% are directed against Rama and his government, while 10–15% target the DP and Berisha personally. “According to our analysis,” he said, those voices come from known far-left extremist groups that oppose the opposition for ideological reasons, and from Soros-funded organisations with which he has a long-standing animosity. The DP has chosen to ignore them, he said, and has urged its members and supporters to keep turning out in force. He also welcomed the backing the movement has drawn from abroad, calling the support of EU parliamentarians and international media for the protests “very important.”
His message to the young people facing batons and, in his telling, a manufactured smear campaign, was blunt: after the movement that toppled the communist dictatorship, “your youth-driven civic protest is the most important movement of the last 35 years.” Therefore, he said — “never stop!”
Exclusive to Truth Times: This interview is original reporting by Truth Times. Publishers wishing to quote or reference this interview should credit Truth Times as the original source and include a backlink to this article.
