Tents on Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. French schoolchildren in the streets. Young Italians climbing into the Colosseum. A suitcase burning in the courtyard of Albania’s Education Ministry. In a single fortnight, Europe’s young people lit the same fire in four capitals, and the only thing that separates the last scene from the first three is a border on a map.
The same fire
The anger is easy to understand once you look at the numbers. Since 2010, EU house prices have surged by more than 55 percent and rents by 27 percent, and new supply has met only half of demand. In Spain, the minimum wage is 1,221 euros a month while an 80-square-meter apartment averages about 1,130 euros in rent. The average young person in the EU leaves the parental home at 26.2, and in Spain and Italy it is 30. The old bargain, study, work, get a home, has stopped being honored, and a generation has noticed.
Madrid’s camp began after the eviction of an 87-year-old woman who later died in hospital. It has since pushed the prime minister to call an early election for November, with a general strike, the first in 14 years. French students have marched for weeks over schools they call understaffed and dilapidated. In Italy, the marches have drawn in students, truck drivers and farmers over the cost of living, with inflation at 4.2 percent in September against 3.8 percent across the eurozone.
The Balkan scene
Albania’s students are not asking for something different. Their protests began with anger over expensive university fees, poor facilities and limited jobs, and grew out of the Flamingo movement against a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner’s investment firm. The burned suitcase was a statement: AFP reported it symbolized a refusal to leave Albania for better opportunities. Journalism student Sinan Billa said it plainly: “We are demanding our rights, our future and a better country.”
Serbia’s students began in grief. The Novi Sad station disaster killed sixteen people, and their slogan became “Serbia or Mafia.” The Balkan movements are driven less by rent and more by corruption, but ask any of these young people what they want and the answer rhymes with Madrid: institutions that work for the people who live under them.
Brutal response, undeterred
The response across the continent has been hard. In Italy, police arrested nine people and briefly detained 371 others, including 110 minors. In France, 2,400 people were arrested in one weekend. In Tirana, police fired rubber bullets for the first time, and the national police chief reported 167 arrests and 132 injured officers over five days, with seven officers suspended over alleged abuse of authority. The violence was not one-sided: protesters threw petrol bombs in Tirana, and Albanian officials blame political opponents for inciting it. Prime Minister Edi Rama has dismissed the protesters as “ideologized and radicalized.”
None of it worked. An Albanian student organizer wrote that protesters would be in the square every day. The EU delegation in Tirana called for a “proportionate response”, and the young people stayed anyway. The same stubbornness showed in Paris and Rome. Arrests thinned crowds for a night, never for a week.
What Serbia proved
Serbia shows where that stubbornness can lead. The students turned two years of street pressure into a campaign, and the Student List won 51.47 percent against 40.42 percent for Vučić’s coalition, taking 140 of 250 seats. It took nearly two years, from the Novi Sad disaster in 2024 to the vote on October 25, and turnout reached 70 percent, the highest in almost three decades. Whether the result holds is a fair question. The Student List named no prime minister during the campaign, its policy platform remains vague, and a movement of many different candidates must now learn to govern together. It has 90 days to form a government once parliament convenes, and a presidential election due by December 26 will show how far the change reaches. Serbia is not yet stable, but for the first time in 14 years it is open. Albania’s confrontation is still unresolved, and nothing guarantees Tirana follows Belgrade. But the lesson of Serbia is that a movement the police could not clear from the street could still win at the ballot box.
Europeans, by their own definition
For two decades, the European Union has told the Western Balkans that it belongs, and asked it to prove it with legal chapters and benchmarks. This October, young people in Tirana and Belgrade proved it in a different way. They took to the streets the same way young people in Madrid and Rome did, for the same reasons, facing the same batons, and refusing to go home. Nobody had to teach them. That is what makes the pro-integration case: the Balkans are not waiting to become European. The protests are testament to the fact they already are.
The EU is right to ask hard questions about policing in Tirana. It should ask them in Rome and Paris too. But the deeper point is simpler. When a young Albanian and a young Spaniard are making the same demand in the same language, the line between “the Balkans” and “Europe” looks less like geography and more like habit.
Benjamin Jenkins Wise
Political Science Graduate and UNCTAD Intern
