Even when it rains during the Tirana summer, the humidity never fully lifts. Hot air pressure simply builds back up from the mountains surrounding the Albanian capital before exploding again. Rinse and repeat.
For the past month, the same could be said of the Albanian people. Every day since May 31, rain or shine, Albanians have taken to the streets in what feels like a cumulonimbus of building discontent. They gather in Skanderbeg Square, Tirana’s imposing central plaza where a monumental statue of dictator Enver Hoxha once towered over the people. From there, they march to the prime minister’s office. They carry signs reading “Albania is not for sale” and wear qeleshes , the Albanian Kosovar skull cap that has become a symbol of the movement, along with the pink flamingo. Reaching its apex on June 20, with an estimated 250,000 participants, it’s the largest protest movement since multiparty elections were held in March 1991, marking the end of the country’s 45-year communist dictatorship. Albanians have taken to calling the protests the Flamingo Revolution.
The movement began in late May as an environmental protest against a luxury resort project planned by Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump for Sazan Island and neighboring wetlands, which are a haven for pelicans, swans and pink flamingos. It has since grown into a full-fledged movement demanding the resignation of ruling Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, in power since 2013, and the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha of the Democratic Party .
The origins of the controversy date back five years. In 2021, Kushner and Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump , took a yachting trip off the coast of Albania — Kushner has said the trip was aboard a boat belonging to financier Nat Rothschild, who later introduced him to Albanian officials — during which they “discovered” Sazan, a former military base off the coast that has long sat abandoned. “That’s how we found it,” Ivanka would later explain on the Lex Fridman podcast in a now-infamous interview. “We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot to the top and we were just captivated. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential.”
Birds gather in the Narta lagoon in the Vjosë-Nartë Delta Protected Area of Albania. Roughly 300 bird species, including pelicans, swans and pink flamingos inhabit this area. (Phineas Rueckert}
In late 2024, the Albanian government granted the project “strategic investor” status and preliminary approval for a deal worth roughly $1.4 billion for Sazan, plus $4.7 billion for the Vjosa-Narta coastline just across the Adriatic Sea from the island. Activists at PPNEA, an environmental protection nongovernmental organization, would later reveal that this had been made possible by Rama quietly removing environmental protections in place since the early 1990s. Albanians learned of the agreement only after it had already been signed. (To this day, Rama insists that no plan has been finalized.)
Everything around the deal was suspiciously opaque. As first reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Albanian media outlet SHTEG, not only were environmental regulations modified in 2024, but the land titles were obtained through a company called Albania Land Development, owned by two Qatari entrepreneurs, Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat. Those titles were then allegedly transferred to Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners.
When bulldozers arrived at a site in Zvërnec, a quiet town in the middle of the Narta wetlands adjacent to a 13th century monastery, without permits or environmental review, public anger that had been building for months spilled into the streets. Near the Zvërnec site, private security guards were filmed dragging a protester along the ground as federal police sat by impassively — leading Albanians to question who truly runs the country.
On a humid evening in late June, I joined the protests in Tirana, the capital, and followed the crowd to the prime minister’s office, an unassuming building with faded pink paint, where the procession came to a halt. A stepladder had been set up, with a rose tied to it by a ribbon. Someone pointed a green laser at the building’s security cameras, blurring their view of the street. Nearby, a children’s section had been set up, with pens and pencils laid out on a long strip of paper for the many young people in the crowd. Every night, the microphone is opened up to citizens who line up to speak for a few minutes each, while images are projected onto the wall behind them. On this particular night, it was a hologram of a pink flamingo. “Albania is not for sale,” the text below it read.
A kids’ section set up during the anti-government protests in Tirana lets them express their feelings. The protests have drawn a wide range of Albanians, from student activists to families, and even some foreigners. (Phineas Rueckert)
One month in, that message remains clear. One of the common refrains chanted at protests is “Rama në burg, Berisha në burg” (Rama to jail, Berisha to jail another: “Ivanka, go home.”
Every night, the cardboard cutouts of pink flamingos bob up and down to the rhythm of protest songs as the laundry list of demands — affordable healthcare, diaspora voting rights, new elections — expands. The iconography is as potent as the anger and frustration that can be felt boiling up in the crowd, but when the storm does eventually break, the future of the movement is anything but clear.
Like France’s Yellow Vests or Occupy Wall Street, the Flamingo Revolution raises the question of how to take a movement forward when it chooses to remain intentionally leaderless.
This was the main topic of a heated discussion on a June 24 panel at the Tirana International Hotel organized by a group of student activists. Like so many other Albanians, they had been gathering at Skandenberg and marching to the prime minister’s office for more than three weeks, explained Ali Dizdari, an international affairs student who moderated the panel. Dizdari, 21, stressed that the students didn’t just come from Tirana, but from Durrës along the coast, to the town of Korçë nestled into the high mountain plateaus near the border with Macedonia.
After several weeks of protesting, the diverse group had taken the initiative to meet with their professors to map out the next steps. They crowdfunded enough money to rent an auditorium in the luxurious hotel overlooking Skanderbeg, and brought in a panel of eight teachers to field questions about movement building.
Activists carry cardboard cutouts of pink flamingos at a protest in Tirana. Protesters say development projects are threatening Albania’s fauna and protected landscapes. (Phineas Rueckert)
“This is the first step, we don’t want to just get swept up in the emotion,” Dizdari told Truthdig. “We’re trying to build something here. And for it to build, it’s a process. It needs time.”
Many, if not all, of the students at the Tirana International Hotel were born after the fall of the dictatorship. After Enver Hoxha’s iron reign ended in 1985, it took another six years for Albania’s communist regime — cut off even from the Soviet Union and often compared to modern-day North Korea — to collapse. But the return of democracy, students say, has not brought the expected opportunities.
“Corruption here is on another level,” Abdulrahim, sitting in the front row, told me. He complained that Albania’s immense natural resources had been squandered, with billions invested in mega-developments like Kushner’s while everyday Albanians struggle to make ends meet. Still, for many years Albanians have been cautious to protest their conditions too much, out of fear of an authoritarian crackdown, he said.
The protests have done something important, Neritan Sejamini, the founder of the news and analysis website Exit.al, told me over coffee in a shady café where a TV showed images from the protests on a loop. The protests “killed the fear,” Sejamini said. “Everyone thought Rama was invincible. People would rather migrate than rebel. But this has debunked the idea that Albanians don’t respond.”
“Corruption here is on another level.”
That fear does not appear to have reached the prime minister, who has shown little sign of budging. Rama — a former basketball player turned artist who gained renown as the mayor of Tirana — has instead denounced what he calls a “hybrid war” waged by foreign interests. Depending on the day, he’s pointed to Greek, Iranian or Kosovar meddling, while also questioning the integrity of foreign journalists covering the movement.
On the proposed resort itself, he’s refused to bend. “There is no chance for this investment to stop as long as I am here,” he’s said. Pressed by the Financial Times in a June 23 interview, Rama’s response was blunter still. “Go fuck yourself,” he said of the protesters.
Still, there’s no question that the protests represent the first significant hurdle for Rama, who has been a darling of the international media since his election in 2013. Until now, Sejamini said, “Rama’s forte was PR.”
Rama regularly appears at international conferences, where he has become known for his laid-back sartorial choices and casual, if at times flippant and profanity-laced, way of speaking.
The cracks of Rama’s public relations blitz were already starting to show by the time of his 2025 reelection. As the Albanian historian and political scientist professor Lea Ypi wrote in The Guardian , Rama was elected in a vote that saw just 44% turnout. His mandate, such as it was, was predicated more on the unlikability of the opposition Democratic Party than on his own popularity. “There was no electoral manifesto, no principled debate with the opposition,” Ypi wrote. “In a country where more than 90% of citizens support European integration, it was enough to paper billboards with photographs of European passports and hammer away with one date: accession by 2030.”
Ejona Aliaj, 34, holds a sign at a protest in Tirana in June 2026. “We have had the same politicians, presidents, prime ministers and we don’t want that anymore,” she told Truthdig. “We need a fresh start, we need new faces who will do the best for the country.” (Phineas Rueckert)
“It’s not a free and fair system,” Jasmin Mujanović, author of the book “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans,” told Truthdig. Mujanović has qualified Rama’s leadership style as a form of “elastic authoritarianism” — “the synthetic appearance of transparency and accountability … to mask deeply illiberal and authoritarian tendencies.”
To Emma Fourreau, a member of the European Parliament from France’s left-wing LFI party who just last week visited Albania, the lack of transparency of the Kushner-Trump real estate deal was illustrative of a broader challenge inherent to democracies not just in the Balkans, but around the world. It’s not the first time Kushner has been chased out of a Balkan country; in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, Kushner was linked to a project aimed at turning an abandoned building into a luxury hotel.
“We can see that this new U.S. imperialism is running rampant, even in Europe — not only through the threats against Greenland, Venezuela or Cuba but also through this project in Albania,” she said. “It’s important for all peoples to stand in solidarity, so that we can mobilize in support of the Albanian people’s struggle.”
How long the current wave of solidarity lasts depends on several factors, including the upcoming summer holidays, the continued international attention and whether Rami ultimately backs down, Sejamini guessed. “It’s nothing less than heroic that it’s been going on so long,” he added.
But though international support has been key to the sustained impact of the protests, the future of the movement, Genti Progni, a digital activist who has spent the better part of five years exposing government corruption, insists, will have to be Albanian.
A man speaks in front of the prime minister’s office during the anti-government protests in downtown Tirana. (Phineas Rueckert)
Progni, a programmer turned anti-government activist, has become a fixture at Skanderbeg Square, where he now runs the microphone each night. He’s cagey about calling himself a leader. “I call myself the waiter of the protest,” he joked. “I serve the internet and the megaphone.”
In a country long dominated by two parties, Progni is as close as the nascent protest movement comes to an elder statesman — and one of its clearest voices against giving it a face at all. “We don’t want to have [a leader],” he said, “because if a leader is in the protest, they will do everything to shut him down.”
“It’s nothing less than heroic that it’s been going on so long.”
One day in June, I met Progni in the coworking space he opened just days before the protest movement kicked off. As he faces threats for speaking out against Rama’s government, he framed the prime minister’s resignation as “the first domino.” Beyond that, he laid out a concrete list of demands: reforming land and investment law, overhauling the vote-counting body, securing diaspora voting rights, and mandating party finance and media ownership transparency.
“I am ready to give my life, too, if my children can live in a better future,” he said. Until then, Progni said, he planned on protesting, rain or shine.
Back at the protests, the rain arrived in heavy bursts to the sound of distant thunder, driving protesters under the shelter of awnings. In the cavernous alcoves of one of Tirana’s brutalist buildings, they sang one of the movement’s defining songs, a rendition of the Italian anti-fascist hymn “Bella Ciao,” the word “bella” simply replaced with “Rama.”
It was an appropriate choice. The song is believed to have originally been sung by 19th century northern Italian farmworkers to protest poor conditions; it gained popularity as an anti-fascist hymn during World War II. Over the years, however, it has become much more diffuse: a global symbol of resistance that inspires, but is hard to place.
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