Albania’s Capital Burns Over a Kushner Resort as Prime Minister Rama Blames a ‘Hybrid War’

Opposition lawmakers in Albania set off flares inside parliament on October 29 as students marched through Tirana for a 17th straight day, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama. They have repeatedly rejected his offers to talk.Protesters rolled away a stone table that Mr. Rama had placed outside his office, covered with written invitations to dialogue; the dissidents burned the chairs he had set out before it. The standoff has seen government buildings torched, the capital choked with tear gas and the country’s longest-serving leader left fighting for his political life.The unrest began in late May when villagers on a quiet stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast clashed with private security guards over barbed wire strung across a beach earmarked for a luxury resort tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. What locals dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution,” after the pink birds that feed in the lagoon next door, has since merged with a student uprising over tuition fees and crumbling universities.Mr. Rama, who has governed since 2013 and won a fourth term last year in a country that sets no limit on how long a prime minister can serve, refuses to step down.“This is not a student phenomenon,” he said in an October 16 video address, blaming “foreign hands that do not wish for Albania to be at peace.”Those who study the country see the resort project as the spark, not the cause of the unrest.“What began as a dispute over the Zvërnec resort became a broader protest against corruption, concentrated power and lack of accountability,” the executive director of the Albanian Institute for Political Studies, Afrim Krasniqi, tells The New York Sun. “The new element is a younger generation, largely outside traditional political parties, which feels represented neither by the government nor by the opposition.”Can a leader who has outlasted 13 years of opposition rallies survive a revolt that wants nothing to do with either side of Albania’s political divide?From a Flamingo Lagoon to a National UprisingThe planned development covers two sites in Vlorë Bay in southern Albania. The first is Sazan, the country’s only island and a former communist military base, and the second is the Zvërnec peninsula beside the Vjosa-Narta protected area, home to flamingos, seals and nesting sea turtles. Early plans called for up to 10,000 hotel rooms.Albanian officials gave “strategic investor” status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, a company connected to Mr. Kushner, in December 2024. At the time, the Sazan project was valued at about $1.6 billion. Months before that decision, lawmakers had changed the law governing protected areas to permit large tourism developments in sensitive zones, including Vjosa-Narta.By July, Brussels was applying pressure. The European Union’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, said Tirana had already committed to undoing those changes and scrapping its strategic investments law as part of its membership negotiations. Mr. Rama then promised to ditch the investment law and rework the protected areas rules.Mr. Kushner, now a United States special envoy, says his investment company bought the Zvërnec land from a private owner for about $270 million, which he calls one of the region’s highest-value deals of its kind. He rejects claims that the government handed the land to investors and says investment in the project could reach roughly $4.7 billion while it would meet high biodiversity standards, preserve the area’s natural character, and create jobs.However, Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors briefly froze the accounts of the landholding company associated with Mr. Kushner that bought the Zvërnec plots amid an inquiry into allegedly fraudulent property titles. Representative Jamie Raskin expanded a House Judiciary Committee probe in August.To one Washington critic, the fight exposes a gulf between those whom the project serves and those whom it leaves behind.“The Trump economic empire, led largely by Jared Kushner, seeks to provide luxury services and goods almost exclusively for the wealthy,” a government affairs lobbyist for the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, Craig Holman, tells the Sun. “The interests of the working class and general public fall outside Kushner’s business projects.”In his view, Mr. Rama cleared the way for the resort while ignoring high unemployment, soaring living costs and concerns about environmental protection, and that neglect is what turned a local fight national.“The luxury resort may be focused on one coastal village, but the lack of governmental attention to the general needs of the public spills the controversy into a national outrage,” Mr. Holman says.Albania is not the first Balkan country where a Kushner deal has hit a wall. Mr. Kushner’s firm had planned a luxury complex at the former Yugoslav army headquarters at Belgrade, bombed by NATO in 1999, after Serbia agreed to strip the site of its heritage protection. The company withdrew last December, hours after prosecutors moved to indict Serbia’s culture minister, Nikola Selaković, on charges including forgery of an official document.The two projects shared a common flaw, according to an analyst who tracks unrest across the region. “What they had in common was a deal directly with the government that was not perceived as transparent, without consulting experts or the local community about its impact,” an analyst for Eastern Europe at the non-profit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, Magda Anastasijević, tells the Sun.Mr. Krasniqi stresses the anger is aimed at Tirana, not Washington. “The problem is not who invests, but how investments are managed by the Albanian authorities,” he says.Fire, Rubber Bullets and a Burning SuitcaseThe student-led movement turned violent on October 13, when protesters clashed with riot police outside the Education Ministry. Crowds later set fire to parts of the prime minister’s office, two ministries and several banks. On October 14 alone, 89 persons were injured, 61 of them police officers.Police answered with water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets. Demonstrators threw a burning suitcase into the Education Ministry courtyard, vowing not to join the exodus of young Albanians abroad. University lecturers have since marched in solidarity, and doctors, dentists and pharmacists signed a statement calling for a transitional government.On October 24, police shot a 28-year-old protester, Erjon Vishkulli, in the face with a rubber bullet. Albania’s health minister later said surgeons in Rome had saved his eye. Crowds have also chanted “Rama in prison, Berisha in prison,” a reference to the leader of Albania’s main opposition party, Sali Berisha.Mr. Rama calls the unrest a hybrid war that feeds on real grievances over living costs and housing. Analysts see no evidence to support his claim of a foreign hand.“No publicly verifiable evidence has been presented showing that these protests were organized or directed by foreign actors,” Mr. Krasniqi says. “Unfortunately, blaming external enemies for domestic failures is a political habit inherited from Albania’s communist past.”Ms. Anastasijević reads the prime minister’s talk of foreign plots as a way of dodging blame. “Claims of foreign interference are a way for the government to shift the focus from their responsibility to external factors,” Ms. Anastasijević says.Brussels Treads Carefully as Americans Head to the PollsThe European Commission condemned the arson on October 18, declaring that “violence has no place in a democratic society,” but said nothing about heavy-handed policing, drawing a protest letter from Albanian lawyers and academics.A package of new security measures announced by Mr. Rama on October 26 would fine masked protesters and organizers of unauthorized demonstrations as well as anyone in a crowd that turns violent, even if they commit no violence themselves. In parliament, Mr. Berisha said it was ruling lawmakers, not the young, who deserved to be tear gassed before his microphone was cut.For now, Albania’s accession talks with the EU are moving ahead, though a European security specialist warns that could change.“So far the EU is watching; they have not given out any statements in a way that would damage the bid. On the contrary, Albania has continued its accession process. But prolonged instability, possible new snap elections could pause the EU bid for a while,” a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Engjellushe Morina, tells the Sun.

Albania’s Capital Burns Over a Kushner Resort as Prime Minister Rama Blames a ‘Hybrid War’

Albania’s Capital Burns Over a Kushner Resort as Prime Minister Rama Blames a ‘Hybrid War’

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