Dua Lipa Challenges the Idea That Superstardom Requires Silence on Current Events Because the Issues Are Considered “Too Complicated”
· Thought Catalog
Updated 10 minutes ago, July 15, 2026
Dua Lipa used her podcast to back the Albanian protests against a Kushner-linked luxury resort planned for one of the country’s most protected coastlines. Her issue wasn’t the politics. It was a government rewriting environmental law with no public say.
Dua Lipa, whose parents are Kosovan Albanian, weighed in on the fight over a proposed resort on Sazan Island and the Narta coast during her Service95 Book Club podcast with Albanian author Lea Ypi.
“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,” she said. She added that she finds it “so inspiring to see how much people really care.”
The comments land in the middle of a stretch that’s been anything but quiet. She spent her honeymoon at Villa Treville in Positano, where top suites run north of $20,000 a night, and on June 27 she opened the Manifesto Library inside Livraria Lello in Porto, a permanent home for her Service95 book club stocked with 100 banned or challenged titles across four themes: power, control, voice, and memory.
The Albania project is tied to Atlantic Incubation Partners, an affiliate of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, with the island and broader coastal development reported in the billions. Albania fast-tracked it with “Strategic Investor” status after Parliament amended protected-areas law in late 2024, and prosecutors opened an investigation in June into the land deals and process.
The protests started May 23 in Zvërnec over early works on protected wetlands, and have run near-daily for about seven weeks, with peak Tirana rallies estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Demonstrators adopted the pink flamingos of the Narta lagoon as their symbol, carrying cutouts and inflatables under the banner “Albania is not for sale.”
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