Since mid-May 2026, protesters have gathered every day in cities across Albania, making the mobilisation one of the longest-running continuous protest movements in recent years.
The protests began as opposition to a luxury tourism development on the uninhabited island of Sazan, while developing into a national and transnational campaign challenging the Albanian government's model of development, the privatisation and exploitation of the land, and the country's increasingly political alignment with Western and Israeli interests.
The demonstrations, now widely known as the Flamingo Revolution, have brought together an unusually broad coalition of environmental activists, students, artists, architects, trade unionists and civil society groups.
Among the movement's most interesting voices is Fioralba Duma, an activist with Palestina e Lirë (Free Palestine in Albanian), who has participated in the protests since day one.
Over the past two years, Fioralba became the most important activist against Prime Minister Edi Rama's migration agreement with Italy, the externalisation of European borders through migrant detention centres in Albania, and what she describes as the growing convergence between environmental dispossession, colonial politics and solidarity with Palestine.
Speaking to The New Arab, Fioralba argues that the protests are no longer simply about Sazan, but have become a broader struggle over who owns Albania's land, who benefits from its development, and how global political conflicts increasingly shape domestic politics.
The origins of the movement
While the movement exploded onto the international scene over three months ago, opposition to the project dates back several years.
Activists say concerns first emerged around 2021, when plans for large-scale tourism projects began to surface for Sazan Island and other protected coastal areas.
For Fioralba Duma, the controversy reflects a much longer process.
"People had been talking about it since at least last year, I'd actually say since around 2021, when we first started noticing development initiatives that would later become connected to the project. We all knew the island was going to be handed over to private investors," she tells The New Arab.
"Today, the island is uninhabited, although during the communist period it had a school, a cinema, and other public facilities. It is, however, a strategically important island, both geographically and environmentally."
The controversy intensified after the Albanian parliament approved legislation allowing the construction of tourism infrastructure, including resorts, in certain categories of protected areas.
The decision came shortly after Albania and Italy ratified the migration agreement, prompting demonstrations against both measures.
The turning point, however, came after private security guards assaulted protesters near the fenced-off construction site in Zvërnec. Videos of the violence quickly spread across Albanian social media, transforming it into a national political issue.
"The footage provoked widespread indignation," Fioralba recalls. "The following day, we organised a demonstration in Tirana."
As the demonstrations continued, the focus quickly expanded beyond Sazan itself. According to Fioralba, the movement has become a broader challenge to Albania's development model, raising questions about who controls the country's natural resources and the country itself.
"At the heart of the mobilisation is a broader debate over ownership and the public interest. It is not simply about private versus public property, but about protecting places that belong to society as a whole rather than to oligarchic interests," she says.
Protesters have also focused on Law No. 21 of 2024, which allows new tourism developments in certain protected areas.
Activists argue that the legislation, together with the dismantling of protections for several protected areas, reflects a wider shift in Albania's approach to environmental governance.
Fioralba pointed to the Vjosa River, where, although the river itself remains protected, parts of its surrounding ecosystem lie outside the protected area.
She also situates these facts within the "Albania One Euro" model. The initiative was launched in 2006 under former Prime Minister Sali Berisha to encourage investment through favourable concession terms.
During the protests, activists also turned to The Albanian Files: Freedom and Architecture, an almost 800-page publication documenting hundreds of architectural and urban development projects across the country.
Copies of the book were scanned, shared and discussed during demonstrations as protesters sought to map connections between political power and what is happening on their land.
A struggle over Albania's future
The movement has also placed renewed scrutiny on corruption, money laundering and the role of foreign capital in reshaping Albania's landscape.
Fioralba argues that major developments increasingly benefit international investors while sidelining local communities and Albanian architects, who, she says, are routinely excluded from the projects.
For many protesters, this has also shaped the meaning of patriotism: defending forests, rivers and coastlines has become inseparable from defending Albania itself against economic dispossession and the enclosure of the commons.
"The fence represented the physical and symbolic enclosure of a place that people felt belonged to everyone," she explains. "It made visible the broader struggle over who has the right to the country's land and future."
One of the most widely shared images was an AI-generated illustration depicting a fictional border between Albania and Israel — a deliberately provocative piece that linked Jared Kushner's investment projects to wider debates about settler colonialism, land dispossession and Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.
"Although the protest did not initially receive widespread public support, the reaction to that image and to the demonstrations showed that Palestine, colonialism and the role of Israel already resonated deeply with many people," Fioralba adds.
As demonstrations continued day after day, the movement rapidly spread throughout the country, while solidarity actions were organised by Albanian diaspora communities in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, the United States and Australia.
At its peak, organisers estimate that around 100,000 people participated — a remarkable mobilisation in a country of roughly 2.3 million inhabitants.
One of the defining characteristics of the Flamingo Revolution has been its ability to unite movements that had long operated separately.
Environmental campaigners, artists, architects, students, designers and long-time political activists have found themselves marching together, transforming what began as an environmental campaign into one of the broadest social coalitions Albania has seen in years.
For Fioralba, that convergence did not happen by chance. "If you look around the protests today, you see environmental activists, designers, artists, students — people who have spent years working on very different causes," she says.
"A friend once joked that it feels as though all of us spent years participating in small, isolated protests simply to prepare for something like this. In a way, that's exactly how it feels."
Rather than creating a new movement from scratch, the protests became a meeting point for struggles that had been developing independently.
Environmental justice, anti-corruption campaigns, artistic activism and grassroots organising suddenly found a common political language through the defence of Sazan and Albanian land.
"We were building experiences, relationships and political awareness separately, until a moment arrived when all of those struggles suddenly converged," Fioralba continues.
"That is why this movement is different. It is not only about one project or one environmental campaign. It has become a space where many different political and social struggles have found a common language."
Fioralba also believes the unprecedented global mobilisations for Palestine helped reshape Albania's protest culture.
While she acknowledges that Albania has experienced major demonstrations before — notably the student movement — she argues that Palestine contributed something different: it normalised public protest for a new generation and offered a political framework through which many people interpreted the developments unfolding in their own country.
"Palestine acted like a kind of fuel. It helped people overcome a certain attachment to the dominant narrative of 'development.' It offered a different lens through which to understand what was happening in Albania," she says.
Palestine in the Albanian Revolution
If the movement has challenged Albania's development model, Fioralba believes it has also begun to reshape how many Albanians imagine the country's future.
One of its most significant achievements, she argues, has been opening a public conversation that would have been almost unthinkable only a few years ago.
Albania's post-communist history, she says, produced an almost unquestionable attachment to private property. After nearly five decades of state socialism, ownership became synonymous with freedom, making criticism of privatisation or large-scale investment politically difficult.
"There are still people who take the microphone during demonstrations and feel the need to clarify: 'We are not against private investors. We are not against wealthy people. We are against those who destroy the environment, who operate without transparency, and who act with impunity.'"
Yet Fioralba believes the Flamingo Revolution has begun to erode those assumptions.
Many protesters have begun questioning an economic model centred on speculative investment, environmental destruction, and the privatisation of public goods, while demanding stronger public education, healthcare, and social protections.
"I would never have expected this from a society that experienced one of Europe's harshest communist dictatorships. Yet this is exactly what I have witnessed. After 35 years of what we call 'turbo-capitalism,' more and more Albanians are beginning to imagine a different future," she says.
For Fioralba, that political transformation also explains why Palestina e Lirë became deeply involved in these struggles. Although the collective was founded in solidarity with Gaza, its members soon concluded that the mechanisms they opposed in Palestine could also be recognised elsewhere.
"We quickly realised that what happens in Palestine does not stay in Palestine," Fioralba adds.
According to the activist, a series of political developments reinforced that conviction: the expansion of Albania's defence industry following Antony Blinken's 2024 visit, the Rama-Meloni migration agreement, the deepening strategic relationship between Tirana and Rome, Prime Minister Edi Rama's growing engagement with Israeli political leaders, and what activists perceive as an increasing alignment of Albania with broader Western geopolitical interests.
Taken individually, she says, each event might appear unrelated. Viewed together, however, they reveal what the movement considers a broader political trajectory.
The result has been a growing debate over what Palestina e Lirë calls Albania's "complicity."
Rather than treating Palestine as a distant foreign policy issue, the collective argues that the same political and economic relationships destroying Gaza also influence decisions about land inside Albania.
"People kept asking us: 'Why do you care so much about Palestine? Why don't you care about Albania?' For us, that has always been a false distinction," she explains.
Fioralba argues that Albania's own history — marked by foreign intervention, the partition of Albanian-inhabited territories by the European Powers, and collective memories of genocide and displacement — has fostered the idea that promises of external investment are crucial to the country's stability.
Yet she believes projects proposed for Sazan, Zvërnec, and Lake Butrint changed this perception.
"We see them as different expressions of what we describe as the 'Israelisation' of Albania — a model in which territory, strategic assets and public resources are increasingly subordinated to external political and economic interests," Fioralba concludes.
Dalia Ismail is a Palestinian-Italian independent analyst and journalist
Follow her on X: @Dalia_dalla_pal