TIRANA, Albania — The excavators arrived before the explanation did. On a stretch of protected Adriatic coast, residents say, bulldozers began clearing beaches with no public notice, no posted plans, nothing but the machines themselves. Within days the capital filled with people carrying cutouts of pink flamingos, the birds that nest in the wetland now marked for a luxury resort, and the protests have not let up.
What they are protesting is not an ordinary development. The project is tied to Affinity Partners, the investment firm run by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, and the plan would turn Sazan Island, a former communist military base, and part of the protected Vjosa-Narta delta into a high-end tourist complex. Thousands have filled the streets of Tirana for three consecutive nights demanding it be scrapped.
The figures are large and contested. Affinity’s Sazan plan alone has been valued at around 1.6 billion dollars, part of a broader vision for the Vlora coast that the government puts at four billion euros. The company speaks of a world-class destination built on, in its words, responsible stewardship and environmental enhancement. The flamingos, the seals and the sea turtles that use the delta did not submit comment.
The detail that turns a development row into something sharper is what Albania did to make it possible. In February 2024 its parliament removed the ban on construction in protected areas, clearing the legal path for building on land that had been shielded precisely to keep it undeveloped. The protection was not overcome. It was repealed.
Prime Minister Edi Rama, a Socialist who has governed Albania for more than a decade, has made the case for the project without apology. Albania, he said, should not be a country that fears an extraordinary project where exceptional partners have come together to invest. The exceptional partners, in this telling, are the family of the American president, and the country being asked not to fear them is his own.
That is the part that travels beyond Albania’s shoreline. A sitting US president’s son-in-law is pursuing a billion-dollar deal with a foreign government that has every reason to want Washington’s favor, and that government has bent its environmental law to deliver it. It fits a now-familiar pattern in which the line between the Trump family’s public roles and its private ledger has all but dissolved, the same blurring critics trace from the presidency’s machinery of self-enrichment to the president’s own delayed financial disclosures. Albania is where that pattern washes up on a beach.
The objection on the ground is partly about nature and partly about consent. We cannot allow Albania to become a new Dubai, the environmental specialist Eva Kushova said, arguing the coast should serve Albanians rather than be paved over for luxury tourism. Residents describe a process with no announcement and no visible plan, only fenced-off beaches and the machines behind them. For a development sold as a partnership, very little of it was put to the people who live there.
The episode lays bare the arithmetic facing a small Balkan state. Albania wants investment, wants closer ties to Washington, wants the prestige of a marquee project on its coast. What it is being asked to spend in return is a protected ecosystem, a piece of its own environmental law, and the appearance that its government answers first to its citizens. That kind of family-linked dealmaking has already become a defining line of attack against Trump at home. Rama has decided the trade is worth it. The crowds in Tirana have decided it is not.
Whether the protests change anything is unsettled. The bulldozers are already on the sand, the law has already been rewritten, and the investors are not the kind a government walks away from lightly. But three nights of crowds carrying paper flamingos is its own kind of signal, the sound of a country arguing in public over who its coastline is for, and whether a development blessed in Washington can be halted in Vlora. For now the machines keep working, and so do the protesters.
