The Improving Sort.

Sazan Island has been occupied by Greeks, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Italians, and the Soviet Navy. In 2024 it was discovered by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who were passing on a Rothschild family yacht and stopped for a swim.

They walked barefoot to the top of the island and were, in Ivanka's word, "captivated." This happens. What followed was a €1.4 billion luxury resort proposal, the removal of environmental protections, and a formal investigation by Albania's anti-corruption authority into how those decisions were reached. Whether anything improper occurred remains to be seen. That the question is being asked at all tells you something about how the sequence looked from the ground.

Ivanka described the project on a podcast as a reflection of "how I want to live" and, more ambitiously, "how I think people increasingly are wanting to live." The people increasingly wanting to live this way will require access to private villas, yacht moorings and marinas on an Adriatic island accessible mainly by sea. The people not increasingly wanting to live this way are perhaps best described as most people, who are dealing with rents, plumbers and the cost of groceries, and who do not appear to have been consulted about their increasing wants.

The Albanian prime minister, Eddie Rama, argued that four hundred luxury yachts would deliver more economic benefit than forty thousand ordinary visitors. This is the kind of argument that sounds plausible until you are one of the forty thousand, at which point it sounds considerably less so.

What is striking is how portable the formula has become. Find somewhere beautiful. Declare it underutilised. Announce an exciting vision. When ordinary processes prove inconvenient, set them aside. When people object, describe their concerns as understandable but mistimed. Residents of Queensland's Sunshine Coast, watching a wetland at Coochin Creek and a heritage park in Brisbane disappear into separate but similarly worded visions of legacy and prosperity, may find the rhythm familiar, even if the flamingos are new.

The environmental protections are being replaced, which is not quite the same as removed. The new ones will protect a more exclusive class of inhabitant.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.