Pop star Dua Lipa has joined the hundreds of thousands of Albanians who are not having any of Ivanka Trump‘s gushing appreciation for a gorgeous island and nature preserve off their country’s southern coast — which she and her husband, Jared Kushner, want to transform into a sprawling, $1.4 billion luxury resort development.
In a recent podcast interview, the British singer, whose parents are Kosovan Albanian émigrés, called the mass “Flamingo Revolution” protests taking place in Albania against the Kushners’ resort project “inspiring,” The Guardian, the Daily Beast and other outlets reported.
Lipa also slammed the controversial way that the project was fast-tracked by the Albanian government in late 2024, the same year that Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump’s father, was re-elected to the White House.
“What I actually find concerning is the principle that the government could just change the law to remove the environmental protection without any kind of public consultation,” Lipa told listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast.
CNN reported that changes to the country’s nature laws were implemented in 2024 to permit luxury resort construction — “structures of excellence, 5 stars or more” — to be built within environmentally protected areas.
The Daily Beast said there is no evidence that Kushner, Ivanka Trump or their team of investors influenced the legislative changes. However, Albanian opposition leader Sali Berisha has alleged that Prime Minister Edi Rama may have been “seeking to buy political influence” from the newly elected Trump by approving a lucrative project proposed by his daughter and son-in-law.
The couple, Trump’s senior White House advisers during his first term, want to carve out a high-end complex — with a hotel, casino and thousands of villas — along a stretch of coastline that’s home to a number of endangered species, including monk seals, nesting sea turtles and more than 200 bird species, including flamingos, CNN also reported. The couple’s plans also include turning the nearby, uninhabited island of Sazan, a former Cold War era military base, into a resort.
In a podcast interview in June, Ivanka Trump described finding Sazan, Albania’s only island, while on a yachting vacation with friends, almost as if she was the first person to discover it, as PBS reported.
“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim, effectively, that’s how we found it,” Ivanka Trump said on the podcast, hosted by David Senra. “We swam to the islands, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
Ivanka Trump also gushed about having “five miles of beachfront directly across from the island” to develop — “this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other, beautiful white sand beaches.”
As the New York Times reported, Sazan is indeed captivating, surrounded by “the clear turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea.” But the Times’ Andrew Higgins questioned the first daughter’s discovery story and whether she was really able to climb around the island barefoot, given that the beach is covered with bramble and stony pebbles, not sand.
Nonetheless, the island remains “an oasis of calm” amid nearby, heavily touristed areas in nearby coastal areas, the Times said.
But environmentalists say this pristine location has already been threatened by the arrival of bulldozers along the beach, presumably to begin work on the project. Concerns that construction is already underway sparked the mass protests in Tirana, Albania’s capital. The protests have entered their sixth week.
The prime minister has called the development “a blessing” for a nation that, more than 30 years after its embrace of democracy, remains among the poorest in the west and could profit from building up its tourism industry, The Guardian reported. Rama also insisted that the project will not “pour concrete on the head of flamingos,” but rather prove that development and nature “can coexist,” CNN said.
Opposition to the project foremost lies in environmental concerns, as well as a desire to protect Albania from becoming “a new Dubai” — a country of skyscrapers and elite tourism, as Al Jazeera reported. Protesters also object to the perceived lack of transparency around funding for the project and how it was approved.
And, with Lipa speaking up, the opposition now has a powerful ally, according to The Guardian and the Daily Beast.
“I find it so inspiring to see how much people really care,” Lipa said about the protests.
Her remarks send a “powerful message to the Albanian government,” environmental activist Besjana Guri told AFP, as the Daily Beast reported.
Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the country’s leading conservation group, the Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA), also welcomed Lipa’s comments, telling The Guardian that they were “fantastic” and “well-timed.”
“It was a very powerful statement,” Trajce said. ” A lot of especially younger Albanians, who see her as an idol, have been inspired.”
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