For more than three weeks protesters have gathered peacefully in Tirana, the capital of Albania, cheered on by Americans who see them as plucky warriors against President Trump, Israel and the greed of the “1 percent.”
The protests were set off by public outrage over violent security guards at the site of a planned coastal development financed by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and investors from the Gulf with an estimated cost of more than $4 billion.
For Americans on the left, Albanians are resisting Trump family corruption and so-called billionaire vultures. Conspiracy theorists on the right are embracing a different theory; they see pushback against Israel and supposed plans for what they call a “new Epstein island” off the southern coast of one of Europe’s poorest nations.
Albanians actually taking part in the protests, however, beg to differ.
“Nobody here is protesting against Trump or Israel,” said Elis Kodra, 33, who turned up with his girlfriend for a recent rally with several thousand people outside the office of Albania’s beleaguered prime minister, Edi Rama.
“We are protesting against everything else,” he added, complaining that Albania has been ruled since the collapse of Communism 35 years ago by the same self-serving politicians who rotate in and out office, give state contracts to their friends in business and pay little attention to the economic and other grievances of ordinary citizens.
The protests began after a video circulated online showing private security guards on May 30 dragging away a man who had joined a few dozen residents and environmental activists on a beach in the south of Albania that Mr. Kushner wants to be part of a proposed luxury hotel and resort project.
They had gathered to protest the sudden appearance of a metal fence with razor wire on the beach, which sits in an area designated a “protected landscape,” which allows construction to take place, near the village of Zvernec. The area and a mostly uninhabited nearby island, Sazan, are both part of the proposed development plan.
Sazan Real Estate Development L.L.C., the company linked to Mr. Kushner that is overseeing the project, said the guards who had manhandled the protester were employed by a third-party security contractor. “The incident,” it said, “was concerning and does not reflect the standards we expect from any party working in connection with the project.”
The government tried to calm public anger by canceling the licenses of two private security companies involved in the beach fracas, firing the local police chief and ordering the fence dismantled.
Yet protests continued, turning Tirana’s central boulevard into a nightly carnival of young and old, setting off what has been called Albania’s “flamingo revolution,” a reference to the protected area’s rich bird life.
Unfurled each night is a big banner in English that reads, “Albania is not for sale.”
Mr. Rama said in an interview that he met in January in Tirana with Ivanka Trump, who is married to Mr. Kushner, and an accompanying team of architects involved with the proposed project. But he insisted that no contracts had been signed or construction permits issued. The island at the center of the project, he said, belongs to the state and has not been sold, nor will it be.
Claims online that construction has already started, he said, are part of a “hurricane of digital hysteria,” though he conceded that there had been some “preparation of the site,” including the laying of a gravel track through a forest.
While a few protesters eager to catch the attention of foreign television crews have waved signs in English against Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, the main targets for their anger are Mr. Rama, 61, who has been in and out of government since 1998, and a former prime minister, Sali Berisha, 81, who leads the main opposition party.
Protesters have chanted, “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail.”
Mr. Rama, who secured a fourth term as prime minister last year when his Socialist Party won a landslide victory, said Albanians were being used as “cannon fodder” in “a fight in the United States and Europe against Trump.”
An online flood of exaggerated claims about the number of protesters, disinformation about their goals and false reports of violent clashes, he said, show that “democracies are committing suicide” by “allowing this venom and this infection to completely corrode their bodies.”
“Democracy without truth is not democracy anymore,” he added.
The government itself, though, has added to the online melee with claims that Iran has been stoking the protests to get back at Albania for sheltering an Iranian opposition group, Mujahedeen Khalq. Officials have also contended that the tourist industry in neighboring Greece, eager to avoid competition from Albania, has egged on and even funded the protesters.
Elez Biberaj, a political scientist and the former head of the Voice of America’s Albanian service, said the protests were not against President Trump’s family but “reflect collapse of public confidence in the entire political system” in Albania.
This has been largely lost in translation, turning the domestic travails of one of Europe’s poorest, most pro-American and smallest countries — its population is under three million — into a global cause célèbre for both the left and the right on platforms like TikTok, X and Instagram.
Lutfi Dervishi, 58, an independent political analyst, said he had grown up before the collapse of Communism and looked up to the United States as a beacon for the rule of law and media freedom. “I never in my wildest dreams thought that Americans would be looking to Albania for inspiration,” he said.
The protesters have inspired mainly American progressives. Senator Bernie Sanders hailed them on X as the vanguard of resistance against the “global oligarchy,” writing that Albania had risen up against an “environmentally disastrous luxury resort planned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Qatari billionaire partners.”
Rachel Maddow, the liberal television news host, cheered the “huge protests against the corruption of Donald Trump and his family.”
Some on the American right have also found encouragement from the demonstrations. Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, lauded the protesters for trying to take back their land “from Israel, Kushner, the Rothschilds and Ivanka Trump,” claiming that Albania “is going into civil war” with “bombings and machine gun attacks.” None of that is true.
Videos filmed years ago during riots in Tirana have been presented online in recent days as violence set off by Albanian fury against Mr. Trump and his family, while a huge gathering of jubilant Spanish soccer fans near a beach in northern Spain has been labeled online as an anti-Trump protest in Tirana led by triumphant young Albanians.
Online support for the Albanian protests has sometimes veered into openly antisemitic tirades. Some feature claims that Jews want to occupy parts of Albania and subject its people, a majority of whom are nominally Muslim, to the same fate as Palestinians.
Those kinds of claims make some protesters worry that foreign activists are trying to hijack their cause. Baki Goxhaj, 41, a practicing Muslim and a pro-Palestinian activist in Vlore, the coastal city near Mr. Kushner’s proposed project, travels each day to Tirana to join the protests with his wife. He said he had told others, “Don’t shout, ‘Down with Jews.’”
The protest movement, he said, “is not against Trump or against Jews,” adding, “It is against our own very corrupted government.”
What Mr. Goxhaj and many others see as corruption often involves the sale and use of land, a highly sensitive issue in a country where the former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha confiscated all private property after he took power in 1944. When Communism ended, this left Albanian courts in a position to adjudicate a torrent of rival property claims by former owners and their descendants.
Gentian Mocka, 56, said his family had been fighting for decades in the courts to recover over 91 acres of land confiscated by the Communist government. The property, which he said was later obtained fraudulently by a local lawyer who did work for Artur Shehu, an Albanian living in Miami, is part of a land parcel sold to partners of Mr. Kushner from Qatar in the luxury resort project.
Albania’s anticorruption agency, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, last week issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Shehu, a naturalized American citizen, accusing him of buying land and using Albanian construction projects to launder money for drug traffickers. The proceeds from his land sale to the Qataris have been frozen, Mr. Rama, the prime minister, said, but the sale still stood.
Mr. Shehu did not respond to messages seeking comment. He had previously called accusations of meetings with drug traffickers “fake news” and said that he had arranged to sell the land to Mr. Kushner and investors through an unnamed intermediary.
Mr. Mocka said that if he managed to get his land back he would happily sell it for Mr. Kushner’s project. “The whole family wants to sell and just wants to be finished with this whole thing,” he said.
Mr. Rama said the protesters were free to gather peacefully outside his office, adding, “Albania is not a dictatorship.” But he insisted that they would not derail Mr. Kushner’s resort project.
“It will not be canceled,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
