Five Points, Six Weeks

New polling suggests the summer’s protest wave cost Edi Rama support that was real, narrow, and temporary. The opposition captured none of it.

On 13 June, at the height of Albania’s summer of protest, a link began arriving on Albanian phones. It was sent by SMS to random numbers across the country, and it led to a short questionnaire. Among the 1,382 people who answered was a question that pollsters in Tirana have been asking for thirteen years: how do you assess the work of the government? That day, with the Zvërnec controversy at full heat and the boulevard still contested ground, 44.1 percent leaned positive on Edi Rama.

Six weeks later, on 25 July, the same pollster sent the same links to another random sweep of numbers. This time 1,513 people answered, and 49.1 percent leaned positive.

The pollster is Eduard Zaloshnja, the independent statistician whose projections Albanian newsrooms have relied on through several electoral cycles, and he published the two waves this week alongside a third data point that was not his: the International Republican Institute’s national survey, whose fieldwork closed on 3 May, before the protests began, and which found 49 percent assessing the Rama government positively. Laid end to end, the three numbers describe a clean round trip. Forty-nine in May, forty-four in June, forty-nine in July.

The round trip is tidier than the data. The IRI figure comes from a probability sample gathered by a professional field operation; Zaloshnja’s two waves are self-administered questionnaires reached through random SMS links, a method that selects for smartphone owners willing to click. The May and June numbers are therefore not two points on one line but readings from two different instruments, and the apparent return to precisely the IRI level is a coincidence of methods, not proof that July’s Rama stands exactly where May’s did. What the data does establish, because the June and July waves share a single method and national random distribution, is the five-point recovery itself. Something between mid June and late July returned a measurable slice of the public to a positive view of the prime minister.

The more interesting question is who that slice was, and here Zaloshnja’s cross-tabulations do work the IRI report never attempted, because he asked his respondents how they voted in last year’s parliamentary election.

Start with what did not happen. Among respondents who voted last year for the opposition PD-ASHM coalition, the share leaning positive on Rama moved from zero percent in June to 0.1 percent in July. Extrapolated to the adult population, that is a movement of perhaps two thousand people out of roughly half a million opposition voters. Whatever restored Rama’s standing over these six weeks, it was not persuasion across the aisle. The opposition’s voters were unavailable to him in June and remained unavailable in July, which also means the reverse: the June dip had cost him nothing there, because he had nothing there to lose.

The recovery came instead from two places, in roughly equal parts. The first was his own base. Of the approximately 765 thousand Albanians who cast valid votes for the Socialist Party last year, some 673 thousand leaned positive on Rama in the June wave. Zaloshnja calls the missing 92 thousand a firo, the Albanian word for what goes missing in handling, and by late July the firo had shrunk to 47 thousand. Forty-five thousand Socialist voters who had withheld their approval during the protest weeks had given it back. The June trough, in other words, was not defection but demobilization. A tenth of Rama’s own electorate stepped back from him while the Zvërnec story ran hottest, and most of them stepped forward again once it cooled.

The second source is the stranger one. Among adults who did not vote at all last year, the share leaning positive on Rama grew from 7.2 percent of the total adult population in June to 9.3 percent in July, which in Zaloshnja’s extrapolation is a gain of roughly 40 thousand people, nearly half the recovery. The protest movement has claimed from its first week to speak for the disengaged, for the Albanians whom the party system has stopped reaching. These tables cannot test that claim directly, because they track only the pool that views Rama positively and say nothing about how the remaining abstainers moved. But they do show that the summer’s turbulence ended with more of last year’s non-voters, not fewer, counting themselves in the prime minister’s column. If the streets re-politicized the disengaged, some of the newly politicized landed on the government’s side of the ledger.

What happened between the two waves is a matter of record rather than polling. The June reading was taken with accounts of sequestered bank accounts in the newspapers and the coastal development file at the center of national argument. By the July reading, SPAK had publicly narrowed the story, clarifying that no investigation targeted any foreign investor as such and that its registered file concerned the administrative decisions of Albanian institutions since 2024. The government had spent the intervening weeks prosecuting its counter-narrative. Polling of this kind cannot assign the recovery to any one of these causes, and it would be a mistake to let the chronology do the work of proof. What can be said is that the political cost of the summer, wherever it came from, proved reversible within six weeks, and that nothing in the crisis moved a single measurable cohort of voters from the opposition’s column toward anyone.

Two cautions belong in the record before any conclusion does. Approval is not vote intention, and a Socialist voter withholding approval in June was never necessarily a vote lost. And Zaloshnja’s absolute figures, the 931 thousand and 838 thousand and 933 thousand that make the tables so quotable, inherit every bias of the SMS method and should be read as ranges wearing the costume of precision.

With those cautions filed, the shape of the summer is still legible, and it is not the shape either side has described. The protests did damage Rama’s standing, contrary to the government’s insistence that the street represented no one. The damage was confined almost entirely to his own base and to the unaligned, contrary to the opposition’s reading of the crowds as the beginning of realignment. And it healed in six weeks, with the abstainers of last May supplying almost half the cure. The five points came back. The question the tables leave open is whether anyone in the opposition has asked why none of them ever passed through its hands.