“Both the socialist government and the opposition are accused of selling off the country’s riches to the highest bidder and opening it up to a level of corruption that undermines any prospect of development. As in Serbia, the European Union’s silence (and complicity) has not discouraged a youth determined to take its destiny into its own hands.”
Le Monde diplomatique, October 2026
Excerpts
Until recently, Albania’s mountains, olive groves, unspoiled beaches and historical remains (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman) attracted an adventurous breed of tourist, very different from the sybarites who want luxury resorts. ‘Despite the lack of infrastructure, and sometimes even roads, Albanians have developed a tourism offer based on hospitality, agricultural produce and tradition. The big luxury complexes are now threatening this fragile economy,’ says architect and urban planner Doriana Musaj.
The Trump-Kushners’ project takes advantage of a 2015 law on strategic investment in Albania which provides for accelerated administrative procedures, preferential access to public land and tax exemptions. The state finances roads, water supply, sewerage and electricity infrastructure, while private investors offset construction costs through advance sales of apartments and villas. Close links to government help speed the process.
At DurrĆ«s, Emirati businessman Mohamed Alabbar’s company Eagle Hills is redeveloping a section of the port as a marina and building residences, a hotel and a shopping complex. Eagle Hills has a 67% stake in the project; the Albanian state, which is providing the land and tax breaks, holds the remaining 33%. However, Alabbar was already facing opposition to projects in Montenegro, and now two of his apartment blocks in DurrĆ«s, built on sandy soil, have been hit by subsidence (sinking by 18cm and 28cm).
The Durrƫs project seems to follow a familiar pattern in which investors close to the government are allowed to grab the most desirable locations. This is borne out by an investigation by the independent Albanian media outlet Citizens.al, which documented 252 decisions of the National Territorial Council (chaired by Rama) over a ten-year period, relating to a total of 11.27 million square metres of land and 5.49 million square metres of floor space (around three quarters of the office space in the City of London).
The ownership structure behind the Vjosa-Narta project is opaque. Starting in 2021, South Adriatic Development, controlled by Albanian businessman Redi Struga, acquired some 1.2 million square metres of land, partly inside the Vjosa-Narta protected area, whose perimeter and protection regime the government has since altered. Land and construction permits were shared out among companies linked to Sazan Real Estate Development, registered in Qatar. Syrian-Qatari brothers Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat hold a 70% stake, but the owners of the remaining 30%, held through companies in Luxembourg and Delaware, are unknown.
Albania’s Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organised Crime (SPAK) suspects the seller of several plots of land, Artur Shehu, of money laundering and document forgery. His name appeared in a 2019 European multinational investigation into meetings of suspected drug traffickers in Aruba, on ‘real estate projects in Albania potentially financed with illicit funds and supported by political authorities’. In ZvĆ«rnec he is said to have bought land using a forged Ottoman register; in September 2024, residents asked Kushner to refrain from ‘actions that infringe on the village’s real property rights’.
In late May, as angry Albanians took to the streets, Ivanka Trump maintained she was working with ‘some of the greatest living architects of our time’ on the Sazan project, which would be ‘the culmination of all [her] experience in real estate’. But as the protests grew, Kushner’s private equity fund Affinity Partners distanced itself, claiming that investors linked to the project were acting ‘in a personal capacity’.
Before the arrival of the Trump-Kushners, protests against coastline landgrabs were largely ignored by the mainstream media, whose owners also have interests in construction and tourism. Now, in Tirana’s SkĆ«nderbej Square, where Enver Hoxha’s statue stood until 1991, demonstrators chant, ‘Jail Rama, jail Berisha [former president and prime minister from the Democratic Party of Albania]’ and ‘Albania is not for sale’.
Gresa Hasa, a PhD candidate at the University of Graz’s Centre for Southeast European Studies, explains, ‘There are 35 years of anger behind these protests. Democracy and neoliberalism were supposed to improve people’s lives, but ordinary Albanians feel excluded from the system.’
Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party, the main political opposition in Albania, also supports projects linked to the Trump family. ‘The Socialist Party is the old Communist Party [later Party of Labour], renamed after the regime fell. Many Albanians see it as perpetuating the old nomenklatura, who have retained their privileges,’ says Redi MuƧi, sole MP for the leftwing party LĆ«vizja BashkĆ« (‘Together Movement’), which is involved in the ZvĆ«rnec protests.
The Balkans are angry over neoliberal policies that have fostered corruption and organised crime. This Albanian protest movement recalls the Serbian mobilisation that began in November 2024… Such protest movements suggest a new dynamic is emerging in this long-divided region.
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