For an eighth consecutive day on Sunday, thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana and along the Adriatic coast, holding pink cardboard flamingos and chanting against their own government. The trigger is a luxury resort project backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump that, in its critics' view, has come to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with how Albania does business: opaque deals, environmental concessions, and the impression that foreign celebrity investors can simply walk in and take what they want.
The protesters call it the Flamingo Revolution, after the pink birds whose habitat sits in the path of the bulldozers.
The Project
The development has two parts. The first is on Sazan, an uninhabited 1,400-hectare island off Albania's southern Adriatic coast that was a secret communist-era military base until December 2024, when the Albanian government declassified it for civilian use. The plan is to turn the island into a high-end eco-resort managed by Aman Resorts, with hotels, villas, a marina and restored Cold War-era military structures. The second component, considerably more controversial, is on the mainland nearby, in the Vjosa-Narta protected lagoon area. It involves up to 10,000 hotel rooms, apartments and villas along five miles of pristine Mediterranean coastline.
