Albania’s Flamingo Revolution against Kushner

The Flamingo Revolution: Albanian Citizens Resist Kushner’s Land Grab

June 19, 2026

When Jared Kushner arrived in Albania to build a luxury mega-resort on protected wetlands, Albanians rose up, forcing an anti-corruption investigation, a freeze on project-linked assets, and a political crisis that effectively halted the project.

What they’ve done is a model for the rest of us.

The Deal

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reportedly first spotted the site from a friend’s yacht. That is the origin story of this Trump-era kleptocratic land grab: a multi-billion dollar luxury resort built by Trump’s son-in law, carved out of protected coastal wetlands on Albania’s southern Adriatic coast where over 70 endangered species live. Those at risk include flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals, and sea turtles.

Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, is backing plans to develop the pristine lagoon near Zvërnec and the former Soviet military island of Sazan, with support from the Albanian government.

In response, Albanians have staged some of the biggest protests—including up to 200,000 people by one estimate—that the country has seen in years.

Albania’s parliament passed a law in February 2024 removing a longstanding ban on construction in protected areas, a legal change that has cleared the way for the Kushner resort project. Then, days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the government’s Strategic Investment Committee, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, granted Kushner’s firm “strategic investor” status, allowing it to bypass normal public contracting requirements. A year later, Ivanka Trump visited the region with architects and investors and met personally with Prime Minister Rama.

Barbed Wire on a Public Beach

Protests began when Albanians trying to access a public beach found it blocked by barbed wire. According to Al Jazeera, excavators had moved into the area with no public announcement and no signage. Under Albanian law, the sea and shoreline are public property, making the fence an illegal enclosure on a public beach.

Video of an activist being dragged away by a private security guard spread within hours. Authorities removed the fence, but the heavy machinery kept working. Within days, protestors stretched half a mile down Tirana’s main boulevard, holding signs reading “Albania is not for sale.” Demonstrators carried inflatable flamingos, turning the wetland’s endangered birds into the symbol of what they named the “Flamingo Revolution.”

Early Successes

Street pressure alone doesn’t stop a multibillion-dollar project backed by the US president’s son-in-law. But street pressure combined with a functioning anti-corruption apparatus can.

Albania’s Special Prosecution against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) has opened a formal investigation into how the Vjosa-Narta area was stripped of its protected status, focusing on rushed legal changes and allegedly fraudulent property titles. SPAK then ordered a preventative seizure of approximately $195 million in bank accounts tied to the project’s landholding company, sharply constraining the development’s ability to move forward.

The European Union also added structural weight. EU officials have warned that proceeding with the resort could jeopardize Albania’s 2030 EU membership goal. The success of the country’s accession process would require full alignment with EU environmental law and a rollback of the 2024 amendments that opened protected areas to construction. Greece also formally raised the violence used against protesters with Albania, and tied minority property rights to Albania’s EU obligations under accession rules.

A Win for Democracy

This is direct confrontation with the same kleptocratic machinery that is dismantling democratic institutions in the United States. This time, it was citizens of another country, with more immediate leverage than Americans currently have, who chose to use it.

In a country of just 2.8 million people, Albanians identified the pattern, named it, mobilized against it, and forced a government-backed investigation that froze assets and put the entire project in legal jeopardy. They did it in under two weeks and without waiting for permission by showing up, staying in the streets, and refusing to go home until institutions moved.

And Albania isn’t an outlier. As PBS NewsHour notes, a similar Kushner-linked development in Belgrade—also fast-tracked on a protected site, following a legal change that allowed the project to advance—inspired thousands of people to protest, building on momentum from a student-led protest movement against corruption. As a result, Serbia’s prosecutor for organized crime charged four Serbian officials, including a cabinet minister, with falsifying documents and abuse of office. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, ultimately withdrew from the Belgrade project amid the controversy.

What You Can Do

Albanians didn’t just oppose “a resort.” They framed it explicitly as a corrupt, elite land grab and tied it to a broader kleptocratic project. You can do the same by calling attention to public land policy changes, mega‑projects, and other Trump‑world deals in your own city or state.

Here are a few ways to take action:

  • Demand congressional scrutiny. Contact your representatives and demand that they fulfill their oversight responsibility. Go to their offices and take a bunch of your friends with you!
  • Keep showing up. The key is to make a visible, sustained, and place‑based protest the starting point of resistance, not the last resort. Albania’s “Flamingo Revolution” was daily, creative, and rooted in the specific places under threat (the beach, the lagoon, and the capital’s boulevard), which forced national and international media to pay attention. In the US, that translates into turning key sites—courthouses, agency headquarters, and threatened public lands—into recurring protest venues.
  • Support ethics watchdogs at home. Groups like Democracy Defenders, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Cause, and the Brennan Center for Justice are building the accountability record future justice will require.

The Albanian people looked at the barbed-wire fence on their public beach and saw the whole kleptocratic machinery for what it was. The barriers around US democratic institutions is as visible, if we are willing to look at them clearly.