Day after day, week after week, the streets of Tirana fill with protestors carrying homemade banners, waving their country’s double-headed eagle flag and bearing inflatable flamingos. Albania’s so-called ‘Flamingo’ movement refuses to die down, despite the defiance of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

The protest is politicising a nation, with many making their collective voice heard for the first time. The Progressive International’s Co-General Coordinator David Adler has been on the ground in Tirana with activists from PI member Lëvizja Bashkë. “I’ve never seen anything like this in Albania,” he wrote from the capital. “Thousands upon thousands of people in the streets, the vast majority of them at a protest for the first time in their lives, speaking openly, passionately, and powerfully about what it means to fight oligarchy in Albania and across the Atlantic.”

They have been moved to take to the streets by the scandal of the Trump family’s luxury land grab on their precious coastline: a bid to turn the publicly-owned Sazan Island into a “private island” destination — and the ecologically rich Vjosa-Narta into an exclusive destination for the world’s oligarchs.

The projects threaten the area’s lagoons, dunes, pine forest, turtle nesting grounds, monk seals and more than 200 species of migratory birds. They are also an affront to the basic principles of democracy, sovereignty, and the rule of law in a country that — under the reign of Prime Minister Edi Rama — has been sold away, one luxury resort at a time, to the highest bidder in order to launder dark money flowing through the veins of the Reactionary International.

The flamingo has become the face of that combined threat. It stands for the living land that Albanians are being told to surrender: fenced off, reclassified, bulldozed, guarded and repackaged for foreign wealth.

Our research consortium on the Reactionary International has now published a new investigation into the Trump-Kushner bid for Albania’s coast. It shows how the project has advanced through a web of opaque companies, disputed land titles, political connections and a path cleared by a state that is meant to protect. It tells the story of a country whose coastline is being prepared for sale before its people have been given clear answers about who owns the land, who approved the deal, who will profit from it and who will pay the price.

Edi Rama’s response has been defiant. “Fuck you,” he told critics who accuse him of presiding over the system behind the deal. He has dismissed the protests as misinformation and foreign interference, insisting simultaneously that no project has yet been finalised and that it will go ahead come what may.

That is why the uprising has travelled far beyond the boundaries of a resort project. It is about land: the ancestral coast, common wealth and living ecosystems threatened by the Trump-Kushner development machine. It is about the economy: a country ruled for too long by a narrow class of wealthy insiders who treat workers, communities and public goods as obstacles to their deals. It is about sovereignty: the right of Albanians to decide the future of their country, rather than watch it brokered through back rooms between Edi Rama and Donald Trump’s family.

For years, Lëvizja Bashkë has organised against this system of oligarchy and dispossession. "The Kushner project was the last straw for injustices in Albania. Protesters are fed up with this entire oligarchic system and our prime minister, who acts as if he owns the country," said Arlind Qori, the leader of Lëvizja Bashkë. Now that work has helped bring thousands into the streets. Their uprising has made Albania a frontline in the global struggle against the Reactionary International: the billionaires, politicians, developers and brokers who move across borders to seize land, evade democracy and turn whole countries into assets.

The Progressive International stands with Lëvizja Bashkë and the people of Albania. From Tirana to the Vjosa-Narta coast, they are showing Europe, the United States and the world what refusal looks like: no to Trump, no to Kushner, no to oligarchy, no to the sale of a country.

Read the investigation and support the campaign today. Every $10, $20, or $50 donation helps us keep up the fight as Edi Rama’s government attempts to crack down to stop it.

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South Africa’s movements resist xenophobic terror

The Progressive International’s Observatory issued a Red Alert on the campaign of xenophobic terror menacing South Africa, where armed groups linked to March and March are driving migrants and minority communities from homes, businesses, clinics and schools. With thousands already displaced and a 30 June “deadline” now being used to escalate intimidation, migrants are being made scapegoats for a crisis they did not create: mass unemployment, collapsed services, hunger and corruption. Progressive forces — including Abahlali baseMjondolo, SAFTU and SERI — are fighting back against the attempt to fracture the working class and shield the architects of immiseration from accountability. Thapelo Mohapi, General Secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo, warns that organised xenophobic violence in South Africa risks a dangerous return to ethnic mobilisation.

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In Kenya, writer Gathanga Ndungu — a member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network and Mathare Social Justice Centre, a Progressive International member — has been arrested during the 25 June Gen Z commemoration. As hundreds were detained across the country, Ndungu was taken to Nairobi Central Police Station, where comrades say he is being held without lawful basis. The Progressive International joins the demand for his immediate and unconditional release.

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In India, the Amazon India Workers Union has filed complaints with the Chief Labour Commissioner and National Human Rights Commission after two workers, Narendra Prasad and Amit Arya, died in a fire at an Amazon warehouse in Haldwani. According to the complaint cited by AIWU, the workers were trapped inside after the warehouse shutter was locked from the outside; the union’s fact-finding report also points to alleged failures in fire certification, emergency exits, alarms, ventilation and safety training. As Amazon prepares its biggest ever Prime Day in India, AIWU is demanding an independent inquiry, legal action against those responsible, safety audits across Amazon-linked warehouses, and ₹1 crore ($106,000) compensation for each bereaved family.

Our History

27 June 1954 - Coup in Guatemala

On 27 June 1954, the United States backed a coup against the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz.

Learn more about this imperialist coup, its corporate backers and the project it overthrew with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

28 June 2009 - Coup in Honduras

The Honduran army's military coup, with implicit support from the United States, against President Manuel Zelaya took place on 28 June 2009.

Learn more about the coup with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.