Edi Rama Pelted With Eggs in New York
Albania's prime minister was met with eggs and protests on his arrival in New York for the UN General Assembly, and hit back by calling the crowd "hysterical hens" from their own village.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was met on the evening of September 25 by a protest of his own countrymen in New York, who threw eggs at him while he was in the city for the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. The episode is being watched in Belgrade too, coming at a moment when Tirana is pushing hard on its own path into the European Union, a pace regional observers inevitably compare with Serbia’s slower negotiations.
Accounts differ on exactly where the incident happened. Serbian outlet B92 reports that demonstrators were waiting for Rama outside the UN building and threw the eggs as he stepped out of his car. The Greek outlet Parapolitika, however, writes that the crowd had gathered near the venue where the Albanian delegation had an event scheduled that same evening. Both outlets agree that no egg actually hit the prime minister, though some passed very close to his head, while the crowd shouted that he was a “mafioso,” a “thief” and a “criminal.”
The protesters are part of a wave of demonstrations that has now run in Albania for more than 110 days, known as the “Flamingo Revolution,” triggered by a planned resort on a site tied to Kushner and Trump. Rama had not previously responded to those protests this directly, or this publicly.
What Rama Said on X
The prime minister answered the incident the same day on X, in a tone his critics call typical of his style. Responding to the crowd, he wrote:
“To those wrapped in the national flag who cluck through the streets like hysterical hens, I say only this: I have raised that flag higher than ever before in the eyes of the world,” Rama wrote, in the translation carried by Parapolitika.
He then tied his political record directly to the fight against corruption and judicial reform, arguing that Albania’s institutions had shown, for the first time, that they were able to clean themselves up.
“In a country that was sinking into a swamp of corruption (…) I, together with my party, turned the wheel of justice toward equality for all,” Rama said.
He went a step further and called the demonstrators “hysterical hens from our own village,” while, according to the Albanian outlet Albeu, describing their critics as “strutting roosters of the political and media marketplace.” He added that neither mud, eggs, nor “drool” would stop him from carrying the Albanian flag to the top of a united Europe.
Why This Matters for the Region
Rama went on to argue that the European Union and the United States value Albania more and more precisely because of its fight against corruption, and that the country is no longer what it used to be. Aiming that message outward at a moment when he faces monthly protests at home shows how far the European path has become a weapon in the Albanian prime minister’s fight with his opposition at home, a pattern also visible, in different forms, in other capitals across the region that use their own progress toward Brussels as an argument in domestic political battles.
No official reaction from European Union institutions to the New York incident had arrived by the time this article was published, nor did the demonstrators outside the UN building put out any formal statement about their demands beyond the chants aimed at the prime minister. Whether the footage from New York further fuels the protests in Tirana, now well past a hundred straight days of gathering, is a question the coming weeks will answer.
