Pink Flamingos
The ultra-rich versus an Albanian “Zebra”
Ivanka Trump found Albania from the deck of a friend’s yacht.
“We swam to the island,” she told a podcast last week, speaking of Sazan - a former communist military base, an uninhabited Adriatic outpost ringed by a Marine National Park and designated a Specially Protected Area of Mediterranean Importance. “We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
In a statement evoking Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake,” she described the planned development as “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.”
Ordinary Albanians? Maybe not for them...
It is worth noting that Ivanka and Jared came to Albania after a similar effort in Serbia was quashed by a corruption scandal.
What followed that barefoot hike: a planned $1.6 billion luxury resort development, a law quietly removing the ban on construction in protected areas, an anti-corruption investigation, and twelve consecutive days of street protests shaking the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The protesters are calling it the Flamingo Revolution.
The Quisling in the Room
As our readers are aware, Vidkun Quisling was the Norwegian official who handed his country to the Nazis and ran it for them - a collaborator who volunteered the transaction and framed the conquest as a gift to his own people.
Edi Rama is a quisling to capital and the Trump family. Specifically, to Jared Kushner, whose investment entity received “Strategic Investor” status from Rama’s government for a project on land that Rama’s parliament quietly de-protected in February 2024. The deal bypassed a public process. Environmental regulators were sidelined. The project was approved just weeks after Trump’s US reelection. The anti-corruption prosecutor has now opened an investigation.
When bulldozers installed barbed wire blocking the public beach - Albanian law holds that the sea and sand are public property - Rama said: “There is no chance for this investment to stop as long as I am here.”
The Albanian people took that as a challenge.
The Flamingos
The Vjosa-Narta wetlands are a critical stopover for migratory birds along the Adriatic flyway. Pink flamingos nest there, along with Mediterranean monk seals and nesting sea turtles. More than forty environmental groups demanded the project be suspended. Nearly sixty thousand people signed a petition.
The bulldozers arrived anyway - no announcement, no sign, no environmental impact statement. Just excavators and barbed wire on a beach that belongs, by law, to everyone.
The Zebras
As we related in our series on Viktor Orbán and his American admirers (beginning with PART ONE: “The Most Corrupt Country in Europe”), the zebra became a symbol that focused public outrage on the Orbán government and helped crack his political invincibility. The flamingo appears to be working the same way in Albania.
A flamingo in an Albanian wetland that was legally protected and public property until a parliament quietly voted otherwise is an argument that should win every room it enters.
Which is why the protesters in Tirana are holding cardboard flamingos.
Albania Not for Sale
The protest signs: Albania is not for sale. Ivanka, go home. I don’t want Albania like Dubai.
Rama’s counter: “If a tourist pays 2,000 euros a night, then it is the cook, the driver, the fisherman, the farmer, the developer and the local businesses that benefit.”
Environmental director Eva Kushova’s response: “Luxury tourism becomes economically unsound if benefits are concentrated among investors while environmental and social costs are borne by local communities.”
The cook gets a job. The flamingo gets a parking lot. The billionaire gets the island and… gets to live as Ivanka wants to live.
Where Are Our Zebras and Flamingos?
The question for anyone watching the Flamingo Revolution from the United States: What would it take?
We have the ingredients:
A president whose daughter and son-in-law extract wealth from small European countries by removing the legal protections put in place to prevent exactly that.
Protected US lands being opened to extraction.
Regulatory agencies hollowed out.
Inconvenient scientific monitoring halted.
Coastal protections rolled back.
A sweeping rollback of clean energy.
The president’s personal preference for offshore oil rigs over offshore wind imposed on the rest of us.
A living president who wants his face and name on everything.
What we don’t have yet is a single image. Our flamingo, our zebra - a clear symbol of American corruption and autocracy.
We’ve suggested a few:
The Trump $250 bill and the Ayatollah’s 10,000 rial note. Side by side, they have the same impact in different languages: a leader’s face stamped on currency as a monument to his own importance.
The Trump meme coin. He sold his own face as a crypto token, made big bucks while many of his MAGA investors lost big time. Specific, absurd, undeniable.
A chained national park gate. As parks get defunded, staffed by skeleton crews, or opened to drilling - the image of a padlocked entrance with a “Lease Pending” sign where a trail map used to be. Public land made private by paperwork.
Maybe the zebra works for us - a reminder of how Trump and his quislings adored the most corrupt leader in the EU. Or a flamingo: how the Trump family thinks it’s proper for the ultra-rich to pinch public land in another country.
A symbol worked for the Hungarians. We’ll see how it works for the Albanians.
Here in America, we keep reading articles and signing petitions.
We are still waiting for a zebra or a flamingo.
Notes
Apologies for this article sharing a title with the 1972 John Waters black comedy film classic. It’s unrelated and we don’t necessarily recommend the film.
The Serbia precedent. Before Albania, Kushner pursued a similar luxury development in Belgrade. Within a month of parliamentary approval, prosecutors charged four people - including a government minister - with corruption related to the project. Kushner withdrew. Forbes
The corruption investigation. Albania’s anticorruption prosecutor opened a probe into how the Vjosa-Narta protected area was de-listed and how contracts were awarded without public tender. OCCRP | The Nation
The environmental case. The Vjosa-Narta wetlands are designated under the Ramsar Convention on internationally important wetlands. The petition and environmental group coalition are documented by PPNEA (Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania). Al Jazeera | PBS NewsHour
The Hungarian zebra protests. Thousands of Hungarians staged a “safari tour” protest outside the Orbán family’s Hatvanpuszta estate after revelations that crony billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros kept zebras and antelopes on a private compound nearby. OCCRP
Eva Kushova on sustainable tourism. Kushova is executive director of Destination Management Organization Albania, a nonprofit focused on sustainable tourism development. Full interview in Al Jazeera’s explainer. Al Jazeera
The $TRUMP meme coin. Launched days before the January 2025 inauguration, the coin briefly reached a market cap of $14 billion. Trump later hosted a private dinner for the top 220 holders. Many retail buyers lost significant sums as insiders sold early. Washington Post
Needs to be something ornate and tied to corruption. Any creative artists here?
Eye opening. Thank you