How the Swiss press reads Albania's flamingo revolution: it's not about birds, but about a prime minister courting the Trumps

For more than a week now, thousands of people have been marching through the streets of Tirana holding pink flamingos over their heads in protest against the luxury resort of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law — and the special anti-corruption prosecutor's office SPAK has temporarily frozen the accounts of the company that was buying up the Albanian coastline for the project. Slovak and Czech media have turned this into a story about endangered nature and Albania's complicated path toward European Union membership. Switzerland's Tages-Anzeiger, however, reads it differently: as a portrait of Prime Minister Edi Rama, who mocks his critics with a video in a miniskirt and ties the country's future to the money of the Trump clan.

What Tages-Anzeiger sees

The Zurich daily summed up the situation in a single headline — the prime minister "ridicules his critics and courts the Trump clan." Tages-Anzeiger ↗ Edi Rama, a former painter and basketball player who last year secured his fourth term in office, dismissed the protests as "hysteria" and described the criticism as a campaign amplified from abroad — though according to the AP he stressed that he was not calling the demonstrators themselves foreign agents. To the influencers who joined the protest, he said they "came mainly for attention." AP ↗

On June 8 he went further — he posted an AI-generated video to Instagram showing himself marching in a leather miniskirt, captioned "whoever made this, well done." Euronews ↗ The day before, he had challenged bloggers from the stage to "settle it among yourselves — one dressed as a flamingo, the other as me, and we'll see who wins."

He is dismissive of the number of demonstrators, claiming there were at most two thousand people in the streets and that the protest never exceeded eight thousand. dpa ↗ He summed up his position in one sentence: "There is no chance this investment will be stopped while I am here." CBS News ↗

How this differs from Slovak coverage

Aktuality.sk delivered a classic environmental story — "Albania shaken by a flamingo revolution." Aktuality.sk ↗ Ekonomický deník, meanwhile, warned that the resort "could sink Albania's admission to the EU." Ekonomický deník ↗ At the center of attention are the flamingos, the Narta lagoon, and more than two hundred bird species.

The German-Swiss press pushes something else to the forefront — power and money. The Guardian put the price tag of the resort on Sazan Island, a former communist-era military base in the Adriatic, and by the Narta lagoon, at $1.6 billion; Rama speaks of four billion euros, and the Wall Street Journal even of five — the exact figures are not public. Kushner's fund Affinity Partners is built primarily on Saudi capital, while Albania Land Development, the company that was buying up the coastline for the project, belongs to Qatari investors, the Al-Khayyat brothers. And while the Slovak reader reads about birds, the SPAK prosecutor's office has temporarily frozen that company's accounts and is investigating whether the 2024 change to the coastline's protected status and the subsequent land transfers were fraudulent; according to OCCRP, this was a preventive measure in a dispute over land ownership titles. OCCRP ↗ Local conservationists point out that "no public consultation took place." CBS News ↗ Seen through this lens, the demonstrators' slogan "Albania is not for sale" is not really about flamingos, but about who the country belongs to.

Limits of this perspective

Tages-Anzeiger is a liberal, center-left daily that takes a critical view of Trump and his family — the frame of "a Balkan strongman selling out his homeland to American billionaires" fits it naturally. It does not emphasize that Rama won last year's parliamentary election to secure a fourth term, or that the impoverished Albanian coast genuinely craves investment and jobs; part of the population welcomes the project. The prime minister himself, moreover, maintains that the deal with the Affinity fund has not yet been finalized and that the environmental impact assessment has not even begun — in his view, the outrage is premature.

The "Trump clan" lens can narrow a domestic dispute over the environment and transparency into a purely moral duel against the American president. And since the contracts are not public and price estimates range from $1.6 billion to five billion, caution is warranted for every figure — those cited by the demonstrators and by the prime minister alike.

What hotinfo is watching

• SPAK — whether the investigation into the coastal land transfers and the 2024 change of protected status leads to charges.
• Brussels — whether the European Commission actually treats the project as a risk factor for the environmental chapters of Albania's EU accession talks.
• Rama versus the street — whether the prime minister backs down under pressure or pushes the bulldozers onto Sazan and Narta.
• Violence against demonstrators — the fallout from an incident in which private security dragged a protester along a cliff; according to OCCRP, one of the security firm's employees has already been detained.