Why a luxury resort plan by Trump’s son-in-law sparked mass protests in Albania

Outraged Albanians are targeting the presidential son-in-law for pursuing a $4 billion luxury resort deal in a business climate rife with corruption and environmental neglect.

Protesters in Tirana, Albania seek to stop a luxury resort development that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner wants to streamline on environmentally sensitive land.

(Olsi Shehu / Anadolu via Getty Images)

Dozens of protesters gathered at a scenic lagoon outside the Albanian coastal city of Vlore on May 23 to oppose the development of a luxury resort by an international consortium led by Jared Kushner. The demonstration received scant attention from Albania’s media establishment, which is controlled by many of the same oligarchic forces that support the Kushner project.

But over the next two weeks, the public mood in Albania turned sharply against the resort, in addition to another Kushner-helmed development. The projects have reportedly amassed some $4 billion from global investors, including Kushner’s long-standing partners who run sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. The developers of the Vlore resort sent a stark message by erecting a barbed-wire fence around the property and unleashing a retinue of private security guards to administer beatings to the next round of anti-development protesters in early June. These draconian measures reinforced the broader Albanian public’s impression that their country is becoming a plaything of privileged oligarchs; the protests continued to gain momentum, and built into a major political crisis by the end of last week, with thousands of people now turning out for near-daily protests.

The Albanian government, led by the semi-autocratic and pro-development Prime Minister Edi Rama, now faces a unique coalition of environmental activists, local residents claiming corrupt developers and government officials screwed them out of their property, and ordinary people concerned that Albania’s explosion of luxury development is linked to money laundering. Among other things, the mounting protests in Albania are demonstrating that the Trumpian model of oligarchic impunity is not only aging badly in America but also proving to be an increasingly toxic export.

The complicated and messy scandal has galvanized anti-government sentiment among Albanians, who have long endured rule by powerful oligarchs and corrupt politicians with extensive ties to an Albanian organized crime diaspora. Rama’s Socialist Party and the opposition Democratic Party (with neither socialism nor democracy being anywhere close to either party’s actual governing agenda) often trade accusations of corruption that the Albanian people have credited—often with sound justification.

“It’s a political battle between two sets of criminals,” one local journalist remarked about the Albanian governing duopoly. “There’s no good guys here, so people accept the accusations are true and apply to both sides.”

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Still, the disillusioned-to-cynical Albanian public seems to have found a new common enemy in Jared Kushner and his high-rolling investor consortium. The conflict harks back to 2024, when Rama unilaterally approved Kushner’s controversial development proposal for Sazan Island, a waterless rock covered in Cold War–era bunkers off the coast of Vlore—along with a smaller, but still disruptive, project that would level a nearby coastal wetlands. Albanian environmental regulators were sidelined as Rama fast-tracked the deal. He was initially able to contain public discontent by touting the tourist revenues from the Kushner projects to one of the smallest and poorest countries in southern Europe—a pitch very much in line with Rama’s campaign to get Albania approved for European Union membership.

Sazan Island, about five square miles of rocky scrub an hour off the coast, historically has been a closed military zone—a monument to the paranoid, autocratic reign of Albania’s former communist dictator Enver Hoxha. The rocky outcropping had been heavily fortified with a welter of bunkers, minefields, and artillery emplacements, all to fend off an impending invasion by an unlikely alliance of NATO, the USSR, and neighboring Yugoslavia that never materialized.

After the Hoxha regime’s fall in 1991, Sazan remained empty, apart from the odd hiker or curious Italian tourist. The island has no water source, almost no beach, and a prohibition on camping because of forgotten minefields, long-abandoned stocks of rotting antique artillery shells, and a population of extremely poisonous vipers. With Vlore’s hospital more than an hour away by boat, a snakebite would prove fatal, so hikers are forced to leave at sunset. Albanians had long greeted any proposal to build a resort on Sazan as a punch line, insisting that there’s a reason it remained uninhabited over the past 6,000 years or so.

But that all changed in 2021, when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump took a holiday yacht trip—accompanied by the banking heir Nathanial Rothschild, who introd…