Edi Rama Must Go
A luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner has prompted massive protests in Albania, now ongoing for over a month. The project has become a lightning rod for opposition to Prime Minister Edi Rama’s cronyish development model.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has handed over his country’s territory to host the European Union’s migrant prisons. But while Rama has won friends among foreign leaders, a popular uprising against a luxury resort project is demanding his resignation. (Daniel Gnap / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In July 2021, Ivanka Trump was on a yacht off Albania’s western coast when she, like a modern-day Columbus, discovered Sazan Island, an Enver Hoxha–era army base. She and her husband Jared Kushner were so captivated by the pristine, unpopulated island that they decided to launch a $4 billion mega-resort with ten thousand rooms, planned for wealthy tourists.
The Kushner proposal envisions a vast coastal project centered on Sazan and the nearby Zvërnec peninsula consisting of luxury hotels, residential apartments, and private villas within the ecologically protected Vjosë–Nartë delta ecosystem. Flamingos (among more than two hundred types of birds) and dozens of endangered species inhabit the area.
The project received a major boost in 2024 when the Albanian government designated Atlantic Incubation Partners, an entity connected to Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a “strategic investor,” granting it access to a fast-tracked investment framework.
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