Studenti pobeđuju! - Students Win!
In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech to the World Economic Forum, saying, we are living through “a rupture in the world order,” the end of a pleasant fiction, and the start of a reality where great-power geopolitics answers to no limits. His words ring loud in the Balkans, where geopolitics sits at the heart of the protests in Albania.
Since late May, Tirana has hosted the Flamingo Revolution. It began as a fight against a €1.4 billion luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, planned for Sazan Island and the protected Vjosa-Narta wetlands, home to the flamingos that gave the movement its name. To many Albanians this is a sacred land, and handing it to a foreign developer felt blasphemous. It was also supposed to be protected by law, but an OCCRP investigation found that Prime Minister Edi Rama backed a 2023 law loosening protections on such areas shortly before the project moved forward. On the 13th of October however, students joined, and the protests turned far more violent. They demand lower tuition, real estate investment in education and an end to corruption in their schools, along with PM Rama’s resignation being a core demand. A fire broke out at the Ministry of Education, and on October 24th, more than 300 protesters and police were injured in clashes. Rama has blamed “foreign hands.” What began as a slimy deal at the expense of national integrity is now part of a domino effect of student protest, from Serbia to France.
In Serbia, on November 1st 2024, the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 16 people. Students led the protests, demanding transparency about the station’s failures, and quickly built a nationwide anti-corruption movement. Their program, the 11-point “Student Plan,” centres on fighting corruption and organized crime, alongside social measures in education, housing and healthcare. On the 25th of October 2026, their Student List, Studentska Lista (SL), took about fifty-two percent of the vote and an outright majority in parliament, ending the 14 years of rule by Aleksandar Vučić’s party.
In France, the spark was smaller, yet bore tremendous effect. In September, high school students began blockading their high-schools over missing teachers, overloaded timetables, poorly funded school buildings, and essentially, crumbling classrooms. By October, university students, teachers and unions had joined, and hundreds of thousands were marching nationwide. Their rallying cry, “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres,” roughly translated to “in the name of God, it is darkness” began as a Snapchat message from an undercover police officer. The text was perceived as a caricature of the language of North African-French teens who tend to include words from Arabic mixed with their French; and now protesters have turned the phrase into a slogan now heard in from France to Belgium and to Italy.
These protests have piggybacked on each other, and the media tends to treat them as one wave. So why are they happening in this same time period, and what do they have to do with geopolitics? We saw this pattern in 2011 with the Arab Spring, where one nation’s protests inspired the next, organized across social media, primarily Facebook. Today’s students study what others did before them and build on that precedent. Whether the goal is removing an entrenched ruling party, winning students’ rights, demanding transparency or stopping a real-estate deal, these movements rise in an era of mass social media, when politicians bend the rules to suit themselves in blatant corruption.
To echo Carney (and Thucydides before him), the rules-based order is fading, and the weak must suffer what they must. Yet these students disagree. They refuse to suffer in silence when they know their demands can be won, as Serbia’s students have just shown. They will keep protesting, with hope built on precedent and a clear message: Students of the world, unite!