A large group of protesters brandishing cardboard flamingoes marched through the Albanian capital of Tirana for several nights this week, demonstrating against plans for a luxury resort by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The “Flamingo Revolution” took its name and mascot from the birds whose breeding ground could be threatened by the hotel project.
Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump, and his private equity firm Affinity Partners announced plans to build the coastal resort in 2024. The firm invested $1.4 billion into the 111-acre project, which would cover much of the undeveloped Sazan Island.
Sazan Island was not exactly pristine before the resort was announced. It served as a Soviet military base and chemical weapons depot during the Cold War, and its sparkling waters were littered with thousands of World War II-era artillery shells, explosives, and naval mines. Early reservations about the hotel from Albanian officials mostly centered around whether or not the island could be made safe for tourism.
The government had long hoped to develop the island in some manner, but the cost of removing the military hazards was too high. Sazan Island is festooned with more skull-and-crossbones signs than Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride and, unlike that attraction, there are landmines buried beneath. The land is also encrusted with dilapidated Soviet military structures, which the resort designers actually intended to incorporate into their renovations.
Jared and Ivanka chose to stay out of President Trump’s second Cabinet in part because they wanted to focus on the Sazan Island Resort deal, which was touted by its designers as an “eco-resort community” that would transform “a former military base into a vibrant international destination for hospitality and wellness.”
The Albanian government granted preliminary approval to the Sazan Island Resort in January 2025, inevitably drawing accusations of political favoritism. Similar complaints were made in Serbia, where Kushner’s partnership sought to renovate a long-abandoned defense ministry building into a luxury hotel.
Albanian officials rejected accusations that they only approved the project to curry favor with the returning President Trump and pointed out that the Albanian armed forces have been working on clearing hazards from the island since the summer of 2020, so the idea of developing the area was not new. A small portion of the coastline was cleared of hazards and opened for tourism in 2017.
Kushner and Ivanka Trump, in public statements about it, appeared genuinely enthusiastic about restoring the natural beauty of the island and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was unquestionably enthusiastic about getting them to pay for it. Rama told the UK Guardian in June 2025 that Albania “can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan.”
“We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water,” he declared.
The Guardian spoke with Rama after taking a tour of Sazan Island, which has many hideous Soviet buildings strewn across the landscape, plus miles of underground tunnels that are now “mostly inhabited by bats, vipers, and wild rabbits.”
“There are about 3,600 bunkers on Sazan, armoured concrete mushrooms emerging from the vegetation or perched on mountaintops like lookouts against phantom American aircraft carriers or Soviet frigates. Some will be preserved and integrated into the new real-estate project,” the Guardian noted.
The current wave of protests began after construction equipment arrived on Sazan Island last month and videos of the beach getting bulldozed were posted to social media. Some of the demonstrators have fought with private security guards while trying to gain access to Sazan Island, while others took their protests to the streets of Tirana.
The “Flamingo Revolution” found inspiration from a letter to the government from over 40 environmental groups in January, calling for a halt to the hotel project because it could disrupt the biodiversity of the area — especially its role as a stopover point for migratory birds, including flamingoes.
The ecological angle was mixed with opposition politics, including challenges to the legality of opening the Sazan Island region to development, questions about the funding for the hotel project, and accusations that Rama and his administration are intent on selling Albania off to foreign interests. Besides cardboard flamingoes, the protesters carried signs with slogans like “Nation Is Not For Sale” and “I Don’t Want Albania Like Dubai.”
“We are a small country, and we cannot allow Albania to become a new Dubai. The vision of this government is to transform Albania into a country of skyscrapers and elite tourism, but we believe Albania should first serve its own people and not destroy its history and nature for the sake of luxury tourism,” resort opponent Eva Kushova, executive director of an Albanian nonprofit called Destination Management Organization, told Al Jazeera on Friday.
Kushova said her movement also opposes plans to build a new airport and develop another protected region called Narta-Zvernec.
“Now we see the whole picture. It seems that all this construction was planned years ago: the airport, the Sazan military island, and the nearby Zvernec Lagoon, all promised to Jared Kushner’s company and other joint investors to build luxury resorts,” she said.
Aleksandr Trajce, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA) conservation group, told the Guardian it was the “total lack of transparency” in the resort project that has galvanized many of the protesters.
“We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits, and so now what we are saying is, if they remove the bulldozers, remove the fence and restore the habitats to what they were, then we can start talking,” he said.
Trajce was referring to Rama’s offer of a dialogue with the protesters on Tuesday, although the prime minister insisted the Sazan Island project would move forward, no matter the outcome of those discussions.
“It is very important that we remain welcoming, that we remain fair, and that under no circumstances do we receive the stigma of being a country where investors are met with hostility,” Rama said.
“There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here,” he added.
Rama insisted that his government has “maintained a very demanding stance on the standards of a project that will bring 4 billion euros to Albania. 27 billion euros is the entire GDP.”
“We have been very demanding on all these concerns that those who fall prey to manipulators have,” he added, hinting that the Flamingo Revolution might not be as grassroots and sincere as its boosters maintain.
Politico on Wednesday dismissed allegations of opposition politicking and antisemitism in the flamingo ranks, saying that only a “small minority” were sharing “disinformation online falsely claiming that the land had been sold to Israel” or “invoking Kushner’s Jewish background as evidence of a hidden political agenda.”
“The overwhelming majority of objections are directed at the project and the decision-making process surrounding it. People don’t care about Jared Kushner’s religious or ethnic identity,” Albania expert and University of Graz researcher Gresa Hasa assured Politico.