A protester holds an inflatable flamingo during a demonstration against plans for a luxury resort. Photograph: Adnan Beci/AFP/Getty Images
What Jared and Ivanka want, Jared and Ivanka get? Not if Albania’s ‘flamingo revolution’ has any say in it.
Arwa Mahdawi writes: Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to block the Trump-Kushners’ plans to build on a nature reserve. But they’re not the only billionaires acting as if the whole world was for sale.
Have the Albanians even said thank you once? It’s been moan, moan, moan for weeks now on the streets of Tirana just because Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner want to displace some flamingos and pave over a protected nature reserve to build a luxury resort. Judging by all the protests, the commoners simply do not understand what visionaries the Trump-Kushners are. Nor do they seem to understand Javanka were the ones who discovered Sazan island in the first place. It had just been sitting there, rotting in the sea, until our contemporary Christopher Columbuses spotted it from a yacht back in 2021 and swam to the island to explore. “We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated,” Ivanka recounted on the David Senra podcast in May.
She really put her barefoot in her mouth with that one. Kushner’s Albanian real estate adventures are not new; the country’s government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor” status in 2025 shortly after Donald Trump won the election. But while anger has been brewing for a while, Ivanka’s tone-deaf comments were the final straw. Her podcast interview has been credited with drawing international attention to the project, and supercharging local rage. Turns out people don’t appreciate it when a foreign nepo baby waxes lyrical about “discovering” your land. Nor are they thrilled when billionaires want to take over your country’s largest island, which is public property, for private profit.
The backlash to Kushner’s Albanian development plans has sparked a so-called “flamingo revolution”. Up to 200,000 people have been out on the street in Albania every day for more than two weeks now in what has been called the most significant protest in the country since the fall of communism. Albania’s anti-corruption agency has also opened an investigation into Kushner’s project, looking at why the land’s protected status magically disappeared. Meanwhile, a report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network claimed that the project involves a network of companies and individuals with questionable backgrounds. Some Albanians are now calling for the resignation of the prime minister, Edi Rama. If the anger doesn’t abate, it’s possible Ivanka’s cringe statements might mark the first time in history a podcast has helped topple a government.
Though that’s probably wishful thinking: Rama has said he won’t resign and is being very Trumpian in his approach to the criticism. On Friday, Rama told MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) that nobody gives a damn about the stupid flamingos whose habitat is in danger, and dismissed criticism of Kushner’s project as “ideological bullshit”. He also accused people of using Albania to attack the Trump administration. “You want me to believe that suddenly the American media … the American world is caring about some flamingos in Albania?” Rama complained.
But it’s not just the flamingos that people care about, is it? Albania is far from the only country to be dealing with billionaires and crypto colonialists who seem to think the entire world can be bought or plundered. Belgian crypto investor Olivier Janssens, for example, has been attempting to build a libertarian paradise called Destiny on the island of Nevis, with its own court system. Then there’s Próspera, a private Peter Thiel-backed city in Honduras, with its own laws and police force. And, of course, there’s Gaza, which has been razed to the ground, and readied for the “very valuable” waterfront property that Kushner has salivated about. Gaza is still in a hellish limbo, but a plan that circulated among Trump and his cronies envisioned the “voluntary” relocation of the entire Palestinian population and the creation of “AI-powered, smart cities”. And last year, it was reported that numerous Silicon Valley tech investors were champing at the bit for Trump to invade Greenland so they could turn it into a libertarian “freedom city”.
As we enter a new era of trillionaires, where a handful of people have more resources than many countries, I’m not sure it’s hyperbole to say we’re at the beginning of the end of nation states. Without global “flamingo revolutions”, we’re going to see more greedy land grabs repackaged as visionary thinking. “It feels like a challenge more than anything else,” Ivanka mused during her podcast interview about her Albanian resort. “The culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live …” I can’t speak for “the people”. But let me tell you how I want to live, Ivanka. Peacefully in a democracy without hearing the names Trump or Kushner ever again. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.
