There is a non-zero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital of Tirana to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in Northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”
International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us, and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”
In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party prime minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former prime minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against him imposed by the Biden administration.
Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and string of questionable characters. The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A PR agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were doing so “in a personal capacity.”
The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.
Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflecting their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. They’re further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”
Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitious have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes.
Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims.
These legal grey areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party has expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s.
In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by both rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries.
“Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas especially, he added, “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”
A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the NGO Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by non-residents. As of 2023, thirty-three percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.
While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros a month for grueling 12 hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities, and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad.
Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multi-billion dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country.
The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a New Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.”
It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make themselves richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note.
