"Let's be loud and heard"/ Zhulali: Strategy for strengthening the role of women in politics

2026-04-26 12:25:00, Politikë CNA

"Let's be loud and heard"/ Zhulali: Strategy for strengthening

Democrat Ilda Zhulali was present this Sunday at the activity "Strengthening the role of women in politics. Campaign and leadership", organized by the DP and LGDSH.

In her speech, Zhulali focused on the importance of the active participation of women in politics, which she considered a neglected segment of society in Albania.

Zhulali emphasized that it is necessary to create a strategy for women in politics, so that they are vocal, audible, and strong in their engagement.

Ilda Zhulali's speech:

To change something in our political strategy and tactics. Because by doing the same thing, we don't change anything. On the contrary, if we have tried one strategy and another and another, we learn some lessons from the mistakes we have made and then, perhaps, discover new paths and roads. For example, we have mainly focused on the most vulnerable groups, those who are left behind. In fact, that is the most blackmailable group in Albania today. But we have forgotten what the middle class is, who has a job and is employed. We see them as someone distant, unrelated to us. And I think that is a mistake. Because a person who today has this kind of security, that is, who is employed, has a good salary, thinks more about the quality of life than someone who is dependent only on the salary they receive to survive. And we have not exploited, I think, enough of this potential.

On the contrary, we have mistakenly seen these people as automatically and only connected to power. And this is a way in which we can try, to change this strategy, but this is not done in the last month of the campaign. Absolutely not. This is done by building, we have another election in a year, the local elections and for this we should have started working a year ago. But we still have time for things to change, so that our electoral campaign starts now and we identify those groups that we must approach and build those new relationships to bring them closer to us. Without exposing them, but by making them our collaborators and at the end of the day, expanding our electorate. The power of women.

Women have a strange connection with each other. Men have less of it because of the way we communicate. If men generally only talk about big issues, women talk about their daily lives. And we should turn this into our advantage. And, for example, a kindergarten teacher is an extraordinary asset that we have not used. She has connections with so many numbers, with so many other parents. There are a very large number, teachers. So there are some categories that we should use better, bring them closer to us and understand by categorizing them as target groups and maintaining permanent contact, also to understand, to build a relationship that is mutual, so that a communication vessel to give and receive and this can then help us to build an even more efficient strategy.

Since you want to know what women want, I said, I'm telling you one thing, they want to be heard, I said, you're all men, you only have one woman at the table and you don't want to hear what women want, I said. Thank you for all the thoughts you give, but I don't think you know better than me what a woman wants. When we say that programs for women should be built, it's that women should really be the ones who design these programs, because they know what problems we have, but also how to communicate these things. And this communication, if we have to continue to insist that we must first have this communication internally with each other, among ourselves, to be clearer, to be more structured about what we need and then to make the change further. For example, can we say today, we are members of the Democratic League of Women. What is missing from this connection today? What do we need? To be more present, more vocal, more powerful within the Democratic Party. Are we able to do this today? We haven't done it so far, otherwise we would have changed things. So the time has come that even when we talk, even when we say that we must actually turn this into a concrete commitment today. /CNA