TIRANA — It began with flamingos, and it has arrived at the prime minister’s door. Two weeks after Albanians started protesting a luxury resort that the family of Jared Kushner wants to build on a protected lagoon, the demonstrations have swelled into the largest the country has seen in years, and their target is no longer only the development. It is the government that cleared the way for it.
On Wednesday tens of thousands filled the boulevard outside Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office in Tirana, a crowd that stretched half a mile, waving inflatable pink flamingos and signs reading Albania is not for sale. They chanted for a New Albania, and many called openly for Rama to resign, according to Al Jazeera. The movement now has a name, the Flamingo Revolution, after the birds that winter on the wetland the resort would border.
It did not start this big. The anger first broke out on the southern coast near the village of Zvernec, where bulldozers and a fence appeared on a protected shore, and it has built daily for almost two weeks, moving from the coast to the capital and from the environment to the government itself.
The project at the centre of it is enormous. Valued at around five billion euros, it is the work of Affinity Partners, the investment firm Kushner founded after leaving the Trump White House, with his wife Ivanka Trump also attached. The plan is for hotels, villas and a marina spread across the Vjosa-Narta Lagoon and the uninhabited island of Sazan, a former communist military base the couple toured by yacht before the deal took shape, as Al Jazeera has reported.
What that footprint would sit on is the heart of the objection. The Vjosa-Narta Lagoon is a protected wetland that, by the count of Wetlands International, shelters more than 200 bird species and over 70 that are endangered, among them flamingos, Dalmatian pelicans, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting loggerhead turtles. The organisation has called the site irreplaceable and uniquely intact. To build a resort city across it, the protesters argue, is to pave a sanctuary for the benefit of a foreign president’s family.
There is a legal cloud over how it was approved, too. Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, SPAK, has opened a criminal investigation into the land deals and into changes made to the law in 2024 that quietly stripped part of the area of its protected status. To many Albanians the sequence looks unmistakable: the rules were rewritten, and then the coast was handed to the Kushners.
That suspicion is what turned an environmental campaign into a political one. This is the prime example of what has been happening in Albania for the last 35 years, one protester told reporters, so today, enough is enough. We want a new era, said another, we want a better country. The resort, for them, is less the disease than the symptom, the clearest sign of a state that they say serves insiders and outsiders before its own people. Earlier in the year the same movement had already forced Rama to dismiss his deputy, Belinda Balluku, over corruption allegations.
Rama is not retreating. He has insisted the project will proceed responsibly once an environmental assessment is done, boasted that his government is proud of what it has done for Albania’s wildlife, and dismissed the central charge outright, declaring that there is no such thing as a Trump family island and that the protesters had been misled big time. He has vowed that the development goes ahead regardless of the crowds.
His defiance now carries a cost beyond the street. The European Commission has warned that Albania’s bid to join the bloc by 2030 depends on its compliance with European environmental law, Euronews reported, and cautioned Tirana to refrain from any action that could undermine the closing benchmark of its accession. A protected lagoon bulldozed for a marina is precisely the kind of action Brussels means.
For now the slogan has outgrown the lagoon. Albania is not for sale began as a line about flamingos and a fence, and it has become a verdict on a government and on the easy passage that money close to the Trump family has found in a small Balkan state. Whether Rama bends or builds, the Flamingo Revolution has already turned his resort into a referendum on his rule.
