Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania. This could be a shining light for Europe | Lea Ypi

The slogan ‘Albania is not for sale’ reveals a nation that respects itself, and will not sell its soul for investment

“That’s how we found it.

We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot to the top and we were just captivated.

And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realise its potential.”

If the woman sharing her desire to improve a foreign island had disembarked from a smugglers’ boat, her dream would have been crushed in one of those migrant detention centres that the Albanian government has https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/14/italy-first-asylum-seekers-albania-pact">recently built with Italy.

But the boat in question was a multimillion-dollar yacht, and the woman hiking barefoot to the top was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsiMd9ZFNk">Ivanka Trump.

Realising the dream merely required summoning the country’s prime minister, Edi Rama, and volunteering her husband, Jared Kushner, and one of his companies to turn a protected wildlife zone https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/04/protests-in-albania-grow-over-jared-kushner-backed-luxury-resort">into luxury real estate.

Lea Ypi is professor of political history and philosophy at the London School of Economics and author of Indignity: A Life Reimagined