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Inside the Fight Over Kushner’s Adriatic Coast

A protected lagoon, a $1.4 billion deal with Jared Kushner’s firm, bulldozers without permits, and private guards beating a protester while the police watched. This is how a piece of Albania’s wild coast was put up for sale.

On a cliff above the Adriatic, a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses punched a protester, dragged him across the rocks, and the uniformed police a few meters away did nothing.

The video traveled faster than the government could explain it. By the night of May 30, 2026, it was everywhere except, pointedly, on much of Albania’s mainstream television. It showed what residents of Zvërnec had been warning about for weeks: that the pine-shaded stretch of coast where generations of Vlorë families have camped, swum and walked the wooden bridge to the island monastery was no longer theirs to enter, and that the people enforcing the new border were not the state, but private men whose faces were hidden. Within forty-eight hours, thousands were marching in Tirana under three words that have become the slogan of a national reckoning: Albania is not for sale.

The fight is nominally about a luxury resort. The Kushner Albania resort project, a multibillion-dollar development tied to Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, would remake the uninhabited island of Sazan and a long swathe of the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape into ranks of villas, hotels and infinity pools. But strip away the celebrity names and what remains is a sharper, more uncomfortable question, the one the marchers are actually asking. When a government rewrites its own conservation laws to deliver a national commons to a politically connected foreign investor, then turns the instruments of force against the citizens who object, what exactly is being sold?

“One day our prime minister came on TV and told us the island was sold”

Sazan is Albania’s largest island, a subtropical scrap of ferns and Cold War bunkers off the bay of Vlorë, set where the Adriatic meets the Ionian, long held by the state and, until recently, off-limits as a former military base. The position that made it a closed military zone, commanding the strait between the two seas, is part of what makes it so coveted now. In 2024, that changed. Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, sealed a deal reported at $1.4 billion to transform the island into a luxury resort on Sazan, an Aman-branded eco-resort. In late 2024 the Albanian government granted the project official “strategic investor” status, a designation that unlocks fast-tracked permits and long-term leases.

The terms are extraordinary by any measure. According to reporting by The Guardian, Affinity Partners will pay no tax during the construction phase, while the Albanian government underwrites the infrastructure: the water, the electricity, the sewage, a familiar arrangement in a country where public infrastructure spending has a habit of vanishing into corruption. The development does not stop at the shoreline. It sprawls onto the mainland, into the Vjosa-Narta coast near Zvërnec, with plans that have been reported to include roughly 10,000 hotel rooms and villas, alongside resorts strung along miles of white-sand beach.

The people who live there say they were never meaningfully consulted. The reclassification and the deal were settled between the state and the investor, and residents learned the scope of it after the fact. The disconnect became vivid on May 31, 2026, when Ivanka Trump told a podcast that she had “discovered” Sazan while swimming off a friend’s boat, and spoke of the couple building a “private island.” In a country where Sazan had been public land for generations, the suggestion that it had been waiting to be discovered, and could now be made private, did as much as any fence to turn local unease into national anger.

The money behind Affinity Partners is not American in any ordinary sense. The firm is funded largely by Gulf state capital, with billions reported from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. What is being built on the Albanian coast, in other words, is a node in a transnational circuit of sovereign wealth and political relationship, with the Trump family name as the connective tissue. Prime Minister Edi Rama has made no secret of his enthusiasm, of a piece with the way he turned tourism into Albania’s national strategy. “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water,” he told The Guardian. “Albania can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan.”

How a protected landscape became un-protected

The legal problem is that much of the land in question was supposed to be protected. The Vjosa-Narta landscape sits at the mouth of the Vjosa, celebrated as one of Europe’s last truly wild rivers, which became a Wild River National Park as recently as 2023. The delta is a place of genuine ecological rarity: flamingos in the salt marshes, pelicans overhead, Mediterranean monk seals, loggerhead turtles, more than 200 bird species and over 70 endangered ones, a critical stopover on the Adriatic Flyway between Europe and Africa.

Protection, it turns out, is a status a determined government can revise. Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office, known as SPAK, has confirmed it opened an investigation into changes made in 2024 to the area’s protected status and to land ownership, the very changes that cleared the path for tourism development. The story of the probe was first reported by Politico. SPAK is not the opposition party and not an environmental NGO. It is the country’s flagship anti-corruption institution, and it is now examining how a protected coast came to be available for private development at all.

The 2024 changes did not appear from nowhere. They follow a pattern. When the government built Vlora International Airport, which Rama has promoted as the largest in the Balkans, it simply removed the airport site from the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape, punching a hole in the middle of a conservation area. The Bern Convention, the European treaty on wildlife protection, objected that the modification to the protected area’s perimeter “is not in line with its biodiversity value.” Local NGOs sued over both the airport and the boundary change. The lawsuits are still grinding through the courts while the bulldozers move.

For the people watching it happen, the mechanism has a name and a loophole. The strategic-investor designation, as a local environmental officer told Jacobin, is what lets a favored developer move forward where the law would otherwise stand in the way. The protections were never repealed in open daylight by a vote anyone could rally against. They were adjusted, carved, and reclassified, until the map said something different than it had the year before.

The bulldozers came before the permits

Here is the detail that collapses the government’s defense. Rama has told lawmakers that the project will not harm a protected wildlife reserve, noting that no final proposal has been submitted and that the environmental impact assessment has not been completed. He has dismissed the alarming reports as “big lies.”

But the absence of an environmental study is not a reassurance. It is the violation.

Since late April 2026, according to BirdLife International and the conservation group EuroNatur, heavy machinery has been operating inside the core of the Pishë Poro-Narta zone within the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape. Bulldozers and excavators have cleared coastal forest, removed sand dunes and cut new access roads through habitat that had never been touched. This is happening, BirdLife stated bluntly, “without permits, without an environmental impact assessment,” with no approved project and no public consultation. Rama has confirmed the clearing is directly connected to the resort plan.

Set the two facts side by side. The prime minister tells parliament the environmental study is not done. The conservationists document that the protected area is being torn up anyway. The study that might say no has not been written, and the destruction that the study is supposed to prevent has already begun. BirdLife went further than most, accusing the government of “providing false information to parliament,” and called on the European Commission to declare that destroying a protected habitat and repressing peaceful protest are incompatible with the EU membership Albania says it wants.

The barbed-wire fences that triggered the protests went up in this same period, near the proposed development site at Zvërnec, and they did not enclose empty land. For families in Vlorë, 13 kilometers away, Zvërnec is one of the most beloved free escapes on the coast: the pine forest where a generation pitched tents and grilled through the summer, the shallow, fine-sand family beach on the spit between the Narta Lagoon and the Adriatic, the long wooden footbridge out to a centuries-old island monastery, the lagoon where flamingos gather on migration. The barbed wire cut all of it off. What is unfolding on the coast rhymes with what has already happened inland, where corruption and unchecked development erased more than a quarter of Tirana’s public spaces. To the people of the delta, the sequence was not subtle. First the land was reclassified. Then it was fenced. Then, when residents pulled at the fences, the men in sunglasses arrived.

A beating on a public beach

The violence of May 30 was not an aberration in the story. It was the story, made visible.

As residents gathered near Zvërnec to protest the construction, they clashed with private security guards assigned to the site. Footage showed a guard punching a protester and helping to restrain and drag him away across a cliffside. Other guards reportedly threatened demonstrators who were trying to pull down the fences. The security firm involved was identified as Major Security, and one of its employees, Gerald Biba, was arrested on suspicion of striking and forcibly removing a protester, who suffered injuries. Seventeen protesters were escorted away by police.

What turned a local scuffle into a national emergency was the conduct of the state. The uniformed police were present, and according to multiple accounts they did not intervene to stop the private guards. The Interior Minister later demanded swift punishment, the State Police opened an internal investigation into the entire command structure of the Vlora Regional Police Directorate, and the local police director was dismissed. Rama praised the police leadership for acting against both the guards and the local commanders.

But the dismissals are an answer to a question the protesters did not ask. They did not ask why one officer failed. They asked why, on Albanian soil, in a public protected area, the coercion was being carried out by private men whose faces were hidden behind caps and sunglasses at all, with the state either unwilling or unauthorized to protect its own citizens from them. The image of hired guards beating a man while police stood by is the precise, literal picture of what “sovereignty for sale” looks like.

One of the injured was a Greek citizen, and Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement of “strong concern,” describing a protest by residents “concerning property rights” and calling for a full and transparent investigation. That intervention carries its own risk for the movement. Greek media have begun to frame the clashes through the lens of the Greek minority in southern Albania, a framing that could ethnicize a protest whose actual strength is that it is broadly, unmistakably Albanian. The slogan in Tirana is not about Greece. It is about Albania, and who owns it.

A protest the television barely showed

The most telling fact about the Zvërnec protests is where they did not appear: on much of Albania’s mainstream television.

The footage from the cliff spread through Instagram, TikTok and X, not the evening news. As thousands marched in Tirana, the people carrying the story were activists, creators and ordinary citizens with phones. Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the University of Graz, wrote that “mainstream media is not covering the protests, but people are organizing through social media,” and that artists, intellectuals and other public figures were stepping forward to back the demonstrators. International outlets, among them Bloomberg, Euronews, Al Jazeera and Politico, gave the story prominent coverage. Much of the domestic mainstream did not.

There is a structural reason, and it is well documented. Reporters Without Borders and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network have mapped an Albanian media landscape in which ownership is concentrated in a handful of companies, many of whose owners hold parallel businesses in industries dependent on public tenders. That cross-ownership gives proprietors a direct interest in not antagonizing the government, and RSF warns that such capture “suffocates” independent journalism. Prime Minister Rama has leaned into the dynamic, broadcasting softball interviews through his own channel, barring journalists from some press conferences, and at points denouncing reporters as “public enemies.”

Albania’s ranking in RSF’s 2025 World Press Freedom Index actually improved, to around 80th from 99th the year before. But a number on an index does not change the incentives inside a newsroom whose owner is bidding for a state contract. A mass protest against the government’s signature foreign investment is exactly the kind of story a captured press is built to overlook. That it broke through anyway, against the silence, is part of what makes this moment feel different.

The price of the land, and who pays it

Follow the money down to the ground and the deal looks less like investment than dispossession.

The villages inside the Vjosa delta are poor and long neglected, some without reliable electricity or water. Jacobin, whose reporter visited the area in 2025, found residents who had sold parcels for as little as €15 per square meter, only to watch the coast fenced off and their access cut. The pattern critics describe is consistent: land assembled cheaply from people with little leverage, then enclosed behind private security, with the promise of jobs and the reality of removal.

This is the hinge of the sovereignty argument, and it is worth stating plainly. Albania’s tourism is booming. The country drew 11.7 million foreign visitors in 2024, a record, with tourism now accounting for more than a quarter of GDP. That boom was built on exactly the asset now being enclosed: a wild, accessible, still-affordable coastline that most of the Mediterranean lost decades ago. The Kushner model does not share that asset. It privatizes it. Critics describe sealed-off package resorts that capture the value offshore, generate limited local employment, and price locals off their own coast, pushing costs in an already strained economy further out of reach.

The promise is jobs and prestige. The pattern, as residents of the Albanian Riviera have already learned through a decade of half-finished hotels and privatized beach bars, is concrete poured for someone else’s benefit, more building than belonging, the same dynamic that has tied Albania’s construction boom to money laundering and organized crime. A country can sell the view. It cannot sell the view twice, and once the dunes are gone, they are gone.

A pattern, not an exception

The Albanian government is betting that this will pass, that the protests will tire and the buildings will rise. There is reason to think it might be wrong, and the reason has a precedent.

In December 2025, Kushner’s Affinity Partners withdrew from a strikingly similar project in Belgrade, a $500 million luxury development on the site of Serbia’s former military headquarters, after sustained public opposition and legal proceedings against Serbian officials over the removal of the site’s heritage protection. The lesson is not that these deals are unstoppable. It is that they depend on the public staying quiet, and that when the public does not, they can fall apart. It is also not the first time the Albanian state has moved against the people on land it wanted: government demolitions of tourist guesthouses in Theth drew national outrage in 2025.

The Albanian protests have an unusual feature that hints at their durability. For perhaps the first time, the former prime minister Sali Berisha, who has built his recent politics in a Trump-aligned register, has not tried to co-opt the movement. Because the project bears the Trump family name, Berisha has backed the investment and cannot oppose it, which has turned many protesters against him as well. A movement that the opposition cannot capture is harder to discredit and harder to negotiate away.

The stakes reach beyond one resort. Albania is pursuing anëtarësimin në Bashkimin Evropian, with the government promising accession ambitions on a timeline of the coming years, and EU accession is supposed to hinge on the rule of law: independent courts, protected environments, peaceful protest. BirdLife has now explicitly asked Brussels to treat the Vjosa-Narta destruction as a test of exactly those values. The same government courting Europe on the strength of its institutions is being investigated by one of those institutions, SPAK, for how it handled this deal. Both things cannot be true forever.

There is a wider canvas here, too, of which Albania is one panel. The same period has seen the country sign a controversial arrangement with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni for offshore migrant detention centers on Albanian soil, and deepen a web of strategic relationships in which territory, loyalty and access are the currency. Across the Western Balkans, the “integration” on offer increasingly looks like a market in which regional leaders trade pieces of the state to a constellation of right-populist patrons in exchange for investment and political cover. Sazan is a coastline. It is also a transaction in that market.

Përfundimi

What is happening in Zvërnec is not, at its core, an environmental dispute or a planning disagreement, though it is both. It is a contest over whether a protected national commons can be quietly reclassified, fenced, and handed to a politically connected foreign investor on tax-free terms, with private force standing in for public consent.

The facts are not seriously in dispute, only their framing. A protected area was de-protected in 2024. Bulldozers entered it without permits or an environmental assessment. A protester who objected was beaten by private guards while police looked on. The country’s anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating. Thousands are in the streets, and the prime minister is calling it all “big lies” while defending the deal that produced it.

For now the movement is asking two things: that the project be canceled, and that Rama answer for it. Whether either happens depends on something the fences cannot enclose, which is whether enough Albanians keep showing up to insist, against a government that has already decided otherwise, that the coast is not for sale.

Pyetjet e bëra më shpesh

What is the Kushner Albania resort project?

It is a multibillion-dollar luxury tourism development tied to Affinity Partners, the investment firm led by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump. The plan centers on Sazan island, in a deal reported at $1.4 billion, and extends into the Vjosa-Narta coast near Zvërnec, with reported plans for roughly 10,000 hotel rooms and villas. Affinity Partners is funded largely by Gulf state capital from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Where is Vjosa-Narta, and why does it matter?

The Vjosa-Narta protected landscape sits at the mouth of the Vjosa River in southern Albania, near the city of Vlorë. It is one of the most ecologically important coastal wetlands on the Adriatic, home to flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals, loggerhead turtles and more than 200 bird species, and a critical stopover on the Adriatic Flyway. The Vjosa became one of Europe’s first Wild River National Parks in 2023.

What is SPAK investigating?

SPAK, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office, has opened an investigation into changes made in 2024 to the protected status and land ownership of areas around Sazan island and the Vjosa-Narta landscape, the changes that cleared the way for the resort. The probe was first reported by Politico. SPAK is Albania’s independent anti-corruption institution, not a political party.

Why are Albanians protesting?

Protests began after barbed-wire fences blocked access to the Zvërnec beach in May 2026, and intensified after video on May 30 showed private security guards beating a protester while police did not intervene. Demonstrators in Tirana, marching under the slogan “Albania is not for sale,” are demanding the project be canceled and Prime Minister Edi Rama resign. Conservation groups say the protected area is being bulldozed without permits or an environmental assessment.

Why didn’t Albanian mainstream media cover the protests?

Much of Albania’s mainstream television gave the protests little coverage, and the story spread mainly through social media, according to activists and academic observers such as Gresa Hasa of the University of Graz. Press-freedom groups including Reporters Without Borders and BIRN have documented heavy media capture in Albania, where ownership is concentrated among a few companies whose owners depend on state contracts, creating incentives to avoid antagonizing the government. International outlets, by contrast, covered the protests prominently.

Is construction in the protected area legal?

That is the central question. According to BirdLife International and EuroNatur, heavy machinery began clearing the core of the protected zone in late April 2026 without permits, without a completed environmental impact assessment, and without public consultation. Rama has said no final proposal has been submitted and the environmental study is not finished, which critics argue means the destruction is already happening ahead of any legal authorization. SPAK’s investigation may determine the legality of the underlying 2024 decisions.

Has Kushner’s firm faced opposition like this before?

Yes. In December 2025, Affinity Partners withdrew from a similar $500 million luxury development in Belgrade, Serbia, after public opposition and legal proceedings against officials over the removal of heritage protections at the site. That precedent is frequently cited by Albanian protesters as evidence that public pressure can stop such projects.