Albania’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, repeatedly called for “dialogue” with rebellious students protesting against tuition fees on Sunday and Monday but was rebuffed – as the number of those present at the gates of the Ministry of Education in Tirana began to fall.
Albania had a long weekend this week in honour of 8 December, the day when student protesters in 1991 began to topple the country’s now hated communist regime.
However, Rama was not on holiday but at his office on Sunday and Monday, vainly calling for dialogue.
“This is a golden moment to build a government in collaboration with the students,” Rama said in a video-message on Facebook on Sunday.
“The government cannot let this encouraging moment for change slip,” he added.
The For the University Movement, a leftwing student group, refused the invitation, however. “You are part of the problem, not the solution,” they said.
Rama also left open the possibility of compromise, saying he was ready to discuss higher tax transfers from state budget – and lower tuition fees. “Our joint aims cannot be reached through ultimatums,” he declared, hopefully.
The For the University Movement has been protesting against Rama’s reforms to higher education for the last five years, claiming that a new law, approved in 2014, erodes university autonomy.
It has denounced moves to increase fees as a way to make universities more economically sustainable.
However, the University Movement appears to be losing control over the protests.
On Monday, a smaller crowd appeared at the gates of the Ministry of Education, while media close to the opposition centre-right Democratic Party attacked the Movement, calling them communists.
The latest protests started last Tuesday, when students at the Faculty of Architecture in Tirana received a notice to pay their annual fees in advance before 15 December because the faculty had incurred high expenses while trying to renovate the premises.
Angered by the notice, the students boycotted lessons and marched toward the Ministry of Education.
Students from other departments soon joined in and, two days later, students from universities across the country burst onto the streets.
In several other universities, in Korca, Shkodra and Gjirokastra, fees are not a particular concern and life is less expensive for students. However, they still joined the protests out of solidarity.
The rallies seemed also to attract the sympathy of some college professors and a wide section of the population.
When marching students temporarily blocked Tirana’s main boulevard on Saturday, TV footage showed that not all the drivers were annoyed. Some drivers even got out of their cars and hailed the protesters.
Tuition fees are not particularly high in Albania and the student protest appears to be channeling a wider anger against Prime Minister Rama, now in his fifth year in post.
But some of the students with whom BIRN spoke during the protest told stories of poverty and real struggle.
Edison Lika, 20, a student of Political Sciences in Tirana, said he had paid for his tuition fees by working during the summer as a welder in Kacanik, in Kosovo, where the US-based contractor Bechtel is building a highway from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, to the Macedonian border.
“We had to work up to 6pm in the evening and I had one day off in two weeks,” Lika told BIRN on the sidelines of a student protest held in Tirana city centre.
“During the weekends I work as salesman in a shop,” he added.
Edison used the money he earned in Kosovo to cover his tuition fee of 40,000 leks [320 euros] a year and other expenditures related to his education.
Next year, when he expects to start his master degree studies, his fee will rise to 80,000 leks.
His family is in no position to help him. His father lost his job as miner in the chromium industry back in 1997, one year before Edison was born.
His father’s pension of 120 euros a month, paid by the government to jobless miners, is the only income that the family currently receives.
One of his friends also protesting on the streets said he had paid for his tuition fee by working during the summer months in tourism.
“I can earn as much as 80,000 leks in a two-month season, but life here in Tirana is expensive,” he noted.
He refused to be quoted by name because his father, the breadwinner of the family, works in the public administration and might face repercussions if his son was seen protesting against the government.
“I have worked as waiter since I was 13,” he said with a degree of pride.
Liri Kuci, a leftwing activist, blamed Rama’s own economic management for the difficulties, criticizing also the latest wave of the so-called “concessionary agreements”, a much-debated government program that has awarded several billion euros in contracts to a few companies in exchange for public works that some doubt will bring any benefits.
“They have become rich at the expense of our parents who survive on salaries of 20,000 leks a month,” she said last Friday to an exalted crowd of protesters.
“They want to rob us with concessions, tariffs, taxes and are inventing all kinds of stuff, to steal more,” she added.
Read more The Balkaninsight
