The Atlantic: In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were sailing the Mediterranean on a yacht when they stopped to swim near the Adriatic coast.
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They arrived at an island and walked barefoot across its hilly, rugged terrain. “In fact, that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.
The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled upon, like Robinson Crusoe, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base.
Sazan is not undiscovered territory for Albanians; it is their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a precious nature reserve.
Fortunately for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.
Three years later – and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 – an investment committee chaired by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into a luxury resort. The venture extends to nearby land beside a coastal lagoon, which serves as an important habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of brothers from Qatar, who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia, and an Albanian conglomerate with stakes in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism.
In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as: “the culmination of all my real estate experience, all my travels, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live.”
Many Albanians see things differently. Hundreds of thousands of people have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of communist rule 35 years ago.
The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and signs with drawings.
The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a brief appearance by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation.
“You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s against a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who was imprisoned during Albania’s communist dictatorship, told me: “government decisions taken in secret, for the benefit of a few, motivated by money connected to oligarchs.”
The beauty of the landscape discovered by the American president’s daughter “belongs to all Albanians,” Lubonja said.
He paraphrased Dostoevsky: “And beauty will save the world.” But Rama, a former professional artist, won’t hear of it.
“They can lecture me about many things – the economy, legal issues, agriculture, healthcare,” he said in a recent interview.
“But there is one thing no one can lecture me about, and that is beauty.”
The Flamingo Revolution, at first glance, looks like the most unlikely anti-Trump protest. Albania, a nation of fewer than 3 million people, is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, and has been so ever since the United States opposed the partition of Albania back in 1920.
More recently, Washington backed Albania’s entry into NATO in 2009, and has safeguarded its security in a historically unstable region sometimes called Europe’s powder keg.
In the 18 months since Trump returned to power, I have traveled widely in European countries with some of the strongest postwar ties to the U.S., including Britain, Germany, and Denmark. One of the questions I hear most often is why Americans who oppose Trump are not staging larger, more sustained demonstrations against him. The question arises particularly when I ask European diplomats why their countries’ leaders do not push back more forcefully against a U.S. president who insults them and entertains annexing their territory. They turn the question back, asking: Why aren’t Americans rising up? Millions marched in the “No Kings” protests; the mobilization in the spring was one of the largest one-day protests in U.S. history. Yet the question remains. Trump earned at least $2.2 billion during his first year in office, while wage growth slowed. He is waging an unpopular war, unauthorized by Congress and unsanctioned by international law. Even pro-American Europeans want to know: Why aren’t people taking to the streets every day?
In Albania, a small country in Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, they are. Today marks the 54th consecutive day of protests triggered by the Trump family development project. Few would have considered Albania as the center of international anti-Trump opposition. But a tour through the country’s recent history suggests it is not as improbable as it seems.
Albania was once one of the most isolated countries in Europe. From the end of World War II until 1985, it was ruled by a ruthless and paranoid communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, whose fear of foreign invasion led to the construction of about 173,000 bunkers. Albania gained the nickname “North Korea of Europe.” The communist state was abolished in 1991, and the anti-communist opposition came to power in parliamentary elections a year later. But the transition to a market economy was not easy. Rapid privatization under a system known as “shock therapy” destroyed local industries and fueled mass unemployment. In 1997, the collapse of massive, state-sanctioned pyramid schemes wiped out the life savings of about two-thirds of Albanians. A small group of politicians has competed for control of the country ever since. Because of this recent experience, the population is highly attuned to the signs of autocracy, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who has studied the demographics of the “No Kings” protests in the U.S., told me. Familiarity can breed complacency. But in this case, it is inspiring fierce resistance.
The Trump family triggered the uprising, but the protests’ target is Rama. The leader of his country’s Socialist Party, Rama came to power in 2013, as Albania was still shedding its isolated identity. Albania became a candidate for European Union membership the following year. Rama was once a fierce critic of Trump, greeting the possibility of the mogul’s nomination in 2016 by saying: “God forbid!” He predicted harm not only for the United States but for the “democratic world.”
Rama is now far more supportive. He hailed Trump’s “extraordinary victory” in 2024 and, a year later, echoed the president’s claims of divine providence, adding: “When Trump says God saved him to Make America Great Again, he tells only half the story. The other half is that He saved Trump also to make Europe wake up and act.”
Rama is one of the only European leaders to accept an invitation to the Trump-chaired Peace Board. At home, he has sought to improve the Albanian economy by upgrading the hospitality industry. He told The Guardian last year: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.”
This aligns with Kushner’s ambitions. “I was very, very impressed by his vision for what he wanted to do with Albania,” Trump’s son-in-law said at an investment conference. Kushner continued: “I really didn’t know anything about the country. I didn’t understand the history and the darkness of the history with communism, and the terrible leadership actually led to its complete underdevelopment as a nation.”
This is not Kushner’s first attempt at high-end development in the Balkans. Last December, he pulled out of plans to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade, on the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry, which was bombed by NATO in 1999.
His investment firm withdrew from the project hours after the country’s organized crime prosecutors indicted the culture minister for alleged document forgery as part of the process to strip the building’s cultural heritage status. The company issued a statement saying the plans would not proceed because “meaningful projects should unite, not divide.”
In Albania, people involved in the resort project claim that construction has not yet begun, even though environmental activists say fences have been erected, trees removed, and sand dunes leveled. The country changed its environmental regulations in 2024, paving the way for development by lifting construction bans in ecologically protected areas.
This move prompted a warning from the European Parliament about compliance with environmental standards as part of Albania’s drive to join the bloc.
Rama’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but Asher Abehsera, one of the Trump couple’s partners in the venture, told me in a statement: “Our goal is simple: to celebrate Albania’s natural beauty, create jobs, and build something future generations can be proud of.”
He added: “Its future will ultimately be determined by Albania and the Albanian people.”
Large-scale demonstrations began in Albania in late May, after a video circulated of private security guards punching and dragging a protester along a beach in Zvërnec, the coastal enclave where part of the Trump family project is planned. “That was the turning point,” Ditmar Bushati, a former Albanian foreign minister, told me. “It started as a dispute about access to the sea and access to nature, and transformed within days into a protest about who should decide the country’s future.”
Thousands mobilized in Tirana, the capital, with banners proclaiming the nation was not for sale and declaring, “I don’t want Albania to be like Dubai.” Rama also paused, issuing a statement saying: “There is absolutely no chance the investment will stop as long as I am here.”
As the protests grew, they became a platform for wild speculation and conspiracy theories. Some protesters saw parallels with Kushner’s support for a proposed “Gaza Riviera,” fearing Albanian land would be used to relocate Palestinians.
Online commentators further called the development “another Epstein island,” a reference to former sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s havens in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A separate controversy, over government-backed plans for a Kanye West concert outside Tirana, added to the discontent. Attention came from all ideological sides. Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the protests as a dissent against “global oligarchy.” Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, enthused about an impending “civil war.”
The prime minister argued that the protests had been hijacked by foreign actors, blaming “Trump haters” as well as “enemies of Israel and Albania.” Albania, where roughly half the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During World War II, Albanians motivated by an ancient code of honor called besa, literally “to keep the promise,” hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before. In this century, Albania made itself a target of the Iranian regime when it agreed, at the request of the United States and the United Nations in 2013, to host exiled members of the dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK. In 2022, Albania expelled Iranian diplomats after concluding that Tehran was behind a wave of cyberattacks targeting government institutions and critical infrastructure. In recent weeks, Rama has accused Iran of waging a “hybrid war” by spreading disinformation about the development and fueling opposition to his government’s plans. Iran has denied the accusations.
The protesters seem determined to prove the uprising is authentic and homegrown. Bushati, the former foreign minister, has called the protests “the best investment in our image as a people and on our path to the European Union.” He said up to 200,000 people mobilized over the July 4th weekend and dismissed claims of foreign interference. “Iran has no influence in Albania,” he said.
“This is a country that lives happily in the U.S.’s orbit.”
Iranian influence hardly seems necessary to destabilize the resort plans. The land on which part of the project is planned is contested.
Sazan, the island, is state-owned, so a lease agreement would ultimately be necessary; the Trump-linked consortium currently has what is called “strategic investor” status, which helps fast-track permits and negotiations for a long-term deal.
However, the coastal land in Zvërnec is private. Entities linked to the Trump couple bought it from a Miami-based businessman, Artur Shehu, who insists his family’s claim to the land dates back to Ottoman times.
Locals in Zvërnec argue that they are the rightful owners. It’s a messy picture because the land was requisitioned by the state during the communist period; when properties were returned to private hands in the 1990s, ownership was often disputed.
The saga became much more dramatic this summer, when an Albanian agency dedicated to fighting financial crimes, the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime, said it was investigating whether Shehu had forged the property’s ownership deeds.
Determining whether he has legal title to the land is only part of a broader investigation by the agency into allegations that Shehu and his associates had trafficked cocaine into European ports and then laundered the money through real estate projects. A message sent to a number linked to Shehu went unanswered; his lawyer denied the allegations to Reuters. The Trump couple and their venture partners are not accused of wrongdoing. A spokesman for the venture said: “The Albanian legal system is the appropriate place to resolve matters concerning land ownership and the integrity of previous transactions. We respect this process and, as always, will cooperate with any lawful process as needed.”
The Flamingo Revolution mirrors discontent with Albania’s democratic institutions 35 years after the fall of communism. Yet the popular mobilization, combined with the anti-corruption investigation that seeks to verify some of its core claims, is testimony to democratic maturity.
Albanian society has developed antibodies to the signs of state capture. The irony is that an initiative originating from the American president’s family would trigger such a powerful immune response.
