Protests in Albania: Marjana Koçeku rebels against her own party leader

Marjana Koçeku stands between columns of smoke and burning garbage containers at a central intersection in Tirana. She stands out in her blazer. Three lanky men accompany her, looking to her left and right so that the politician can speak in peace. “I am an independent MP,” she introduces herself. A few months ago, the 25-year-old was still sitting for the incumbent Prime Minister Edi Rama's faction in the Albanian parliament. Today she is calling for his resignation.

Koçeku comes from the north of the country, a remote area bordering the “enchanted mountains”. Since the Drin was dammed in the 1980s, the kilometer-long Koman reservoir has stretched through the rugged gorge. Koçeku grew up on its banks in a stone house and had a “beautiful childhood”. She remembers boat trips and how her father taught her how to repair the engine. This was important because there was no road to the house. She had to walk up a steep hill to school. She wanted to leave after school; there are hardly any opportunities for young women in the mountains.

Koçeku studied political science and international relations and lived in Tirana, but also in Genoa, Stockholm and Frankfurt am Main. She only came back when the bus driver in Sweden played an Albanian song and she longed for home. From then on she ran accommodation in the stone house of her childhood. She calls it “agritourism”. It went so well that Edi Rama invited her to his podcast “Flasim” in 2023.

A year and a half later, Koçeku posted a picture of herself with a baby goat, announcing her candidacy for the Socialist Party of Albania (SP), Rama's party. Of the two major parties in the country, the SP is the more left-wing. She always believed that the future belonged to those who “dared something”. She received malicious criticism for the picture, which was intended to illustrate her closeness to nature.

Rama jumped to her side. A2 CNN quotes him as saying that she is “a person with a lot of ambition” who has made something of the country “on her own strength.” He called her “enriching” and joked that Koçeku was also so stubborn that she could “become a problem.” She then moved into parliament in 2025.

As MPs, her skepticism grew quickly. “Corruption is almost a political mentality in Albania and is deeply rooted in every institution,” she says. Rama has also come under criticism, for example because of Jared Kushner's planned luxury resort on the coast. “Being part of the Socialist Party means acting against my own beliefs, principles and values,” she concludes. Then the protests moved her to action: in mid-June 2026, she left the parliamentary group and posted a flamingo on Instagram, the symbol of the protests.

She is now on the streets, condemning police violence and calling on the government to resign. At the same time, she is experiencing “great pressure” to resign from her mandate. “I refused because, according to the constitution, the mandate belongs to the MPs and not the party,” she says. Rama dismisses the protests as foreign-controlled and has just announced further reprisals against them. In an open letter from the summer, she wrote to him: “I am and remain Marjana of the mountains, and now I have crossed the fence with no return.”