Thousands of protesters marched through Tirana on Saturday against a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, turning a long-running protest into one of its biggest showings yet. The crowd pressed through the Albanian capital with flags, red balloons and a slogan projected on the prime minister’s office: Albania is not for sale.
The march matters now because it showed how quickly the dispute has grown from an environmental complaint into a political challenge for Edi Rama. Since late May, demonstrators have gathered every evening over the planned construction of a hotel complex tied to Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and many of the people in the streets this weekend had travelled home from the Albanian diaspora to join them.
The project sits at the center of a larger fight over Albania’s coast. Protesters say the Kushner-backed resort and another planned development on nearby Sazan Island would rise near key breeding grounds for migratory birds in the Vjosa-Narta protected area, where flamingos are among the species drawing concern. That has made the plan a test of whether development can be pushed through in a place where environmental restrictions are supposed to limit damage to sensitive coastal habitat.
Alma joined the rally and put the complaint in plain language. “We are not against the country’s development; we are against the arrogance and lack of transparency surrounding projects that affect our lives,” she said. Her words matched the mood on the street, where protesters accused Rama of opaque deals along the coast and treated the resort as part of a pattern rather than a one-off investment.
Rama is trying to push back on that reading. At a party meeting, he said he would not step down and argued that the uproar is driven more by Kushner’s name and the shadow of Trump than by the project itself. That leaves the dispute suspended between two different stories: one about investment and one about trust, with each side describing the same coastal plan in entirely different terms.
The next phase will be defined by whether the protests keep swelling and whether the government gives any clearer answer on the hotel complex’s status. For now, many in the crowd say they will stay on the streets until Rama resigns, a demand that turns a fight over one resort into a broader verdict on how Albania’s coast is being decided.
