It is difficult to imagine what it is like to have nearly unlimited money. What it might be like to arrive at a Mediterranean island on a yacht and to think that the next logical step is that this island should belong to you. So you can develop it into your next real estate project, of course.

But that is the life that Ivanka Trump leads. In May, she explained such an experience on a podcast that interviews the world’s “greatest living founders”: “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated. And it stayed with us ever since, and over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential.”

The “potential” of this Albanian island, called Sazan, is to become a luxury villa resort, and Trump has embarked upon this real estate project with her husband, Jared Kushner. The endeavor, worth $1.4 billion, would render many acres of Albania’s coastline unrecognizable. Because in addition to what the couple wants to build on Sazan, they are proposing to build 10,000 luxury villas on the Zvernec peninsula, which lies opposite the island. Never mind that the peninsula is currently an ecologically protected area known as the Vjosa Narta, including a river delta and lagoon that is home to hundreds of species of birds, including flamingos. They are doing it anyway, with the blessing of a government whose motivations have, shall we say, come under question.

That’s the one bit of trouble with Ivanka Trump’s little project: The people of Albania are very, very angry about it. The development has provoked fury all summer and sparked the biggest outbreak of civil unrest since communism collapsed in the country 35 years ago, in what has now been dubbed, relevantly, the Flamingo Revolution. Even the European Union has gotten involved, and not on the side of the trailblazing couple. The world has never seen a movement quite like this.

The uprising is a sight to behold, and this summer I went to Albania and beheld it. What I found is that this is not just a protest of one project in one area by one couple of American elites. Albania is a country on the cusp of becoming a tourist mecca, the next hot spot for international beachgoers to descend upon in their quest to soak up the sun and dip in the turquoise Mediterranean Sea. But the people who already live there have been scarred by decades of communism and now decades of the dodgy capitalism that replaced it. A dynastic couple calling in their orders for the country’s future from Florida is just the beginning. In Albania, I found a story with roots that go much deeper than anything that has happened this summer.

A routine was established over this summer for many in Tirana, Albania’s capital. Every single night at 7 p.m., once work is over and the peak of the day’s fierce heat is done, city residents turn out on the streets to protest. As I left my hotel, the television in the lobby was playing rolling news coverage of the protests. I told the receptionist at the front desk where I was going, and she said she felt guilty that she couldn’t be there herself, because of her evening shift. “But in my heart, I am there,” she said, pointing to the screen.

I met up with Olsi Nika, the founder of the environmental organization EcoAlbania, at a café on Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square, where he was treating his 6-year-old son to a fior di latte ice cream ahead of that evening’s protests. EcoAlbania and other environmental groups have been fighting this fight since 2021, when rumblings first emerged about the sale of Sazan island and the Vjosa Narta area. What tipped this into a national movement, at the end of May this year, was a video clip taken just outside Zvernec village. Locals came out to the edge of the construction site, a fenced-off area they’d been given no warning about, and made their unhappiness about construction on their land known. The security protecting the site dragged an older local resident to the ground. It was caught on camera and went viral around the country. After that, not just a small group of dedicated environmentalists was aware of the development. Everybody was. And they were furious about it.

Olsi and his fellow activists have reasons to be hopeful that they might actually stop all this from happening. They’ve already succeeded in convincing the government to designate the Vjosa Narta river area as a national park. That happened back in 2023, after nine years of campaigning, and halted the construction of a hydropower dam that would have damaged the ecosystem. Now, this new battle has prompted a lot of additional support, though Olsi still has the specificity of a long-committed activist. When I referred to the luxury resort as a tourism development, he corrected me: “It’s just making money, it’s not about the development of tourism,” he said. That’s one thing my time in Albania clarified to me: Albanians aren’t necessarily anti-tourism. They’re anti–this tourism. “It would be fine if it wasn’t in protected areas, but they want to urbanize—badly, in my opinion—the last pristine river delta in the Mediterranean,” he said.

We arrived at the demonstration, which had gathered near the Pyramid of Tirana—once a museum to the Communist era’s leader, Enver Hoxha, and now a cultural and community center—at quarter past 8. On the first days of protest, there were about 100,000 people crowding this central street, which stretches from Skanderbeg Square down to the Polytechnic University of Tirana, a distance of almost a mile. This was the 49th day of consecutive protests, and there were still many thousands of people turning out each night, draped in Albanian flags. They’re in it for the long haul—there is a sense of orderliness, of anger and energy being spent judiciously to preserve stamina. A woman, an architect in her 40s holding a Styrofoam lawn-flamingo on a stick, told me she’d come every single day so far. I asked her how long she was planning to keep coming down. She blinked at the question.“Until we see the difference,” she said.

These protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful—family-oriented, even. At the edge of the crowd, a clutch of children were all drawing flamingos on a long piece of cardboard on the ground, and many people held pink flamingos on sticks. Groups of young people paraded around carrying banners with slogans such as “New Albania” and “Edi Rama resign.”

What was noticeably absent was any reference to Ivanka Trump.

Maybe that was an intentional rebuttal to the way the powers that be have attempted to dismiss the movement. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister who approved the project and welcomed it with open arms, has tried to pass off the objections as stemming from anti-Trump sentiment. “If it were not Jared Kushner … nobody would give a shit about flamingos, about Albania, about nothing,” he told the Financial Times in June. On the ground, though, the people protesting in Albania are against something much bigger. There are no anti-Trump signs, no anti-Trump slogans. The Trump connection may have attracted international attention, but Jared and Ivanka are almost beside the point.

In fact, more so than practically anywhere else in Europe, sentiment in Albania toward America is pretty positive. Their loyalty runs deep: Woodrow Wilson defended Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1919, and in 1999, the U.S. intervened in the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo led by Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. Many here see America as a lighthouse of Western democratic values. “Because of America, Albania exists,” as one local put it to me. “For the last 100 years, they have been supporting us.”

I gradually began to realize that despite the flamingo as an organizing symbol, these protests aren’t even really about Sazan or the Zvernec development. That was just the last straw. At the edge of the crowd, I ran into Redi Muci, a member of the Albanian parliament for the left-wing party Lëvizja Bashkë, which translates as the “Together Movement,” and the party’s leader, Arlind Qori. “The main reason why Albanians are protesting is basically an economic model of very autocratic ruling of one man, Edi Rama, who is surrounded by a group of economic oligarchs,” Muci said. Yes, the idea that Ivanka Trump could waltz in and buy an island that is actually a nationally protected ecological treasure thanks to corruption sticks in the craw—but Albanians have been living under corruption at a much larger, societal scale for years,........

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