Koçeku recounts messages and phone calls after leaving the SP: “They even came to my home”

Former Socialist Party MP Marjana Koçeku spoke this Thursday in an exclusive interview for the program “Now” with Erla Mëhilli on Euronews Albania about her decision to leave the SP parliamentary group. During the conversation, she also revealed some details from the moment she made that decision.

When asked who she had consulted before taking this step, Koçeku replied that she had not discussed it with anyone else, neither friends, family members, nor colleagues. According to her, the only thing that guided her was her conscience and her convictions.

After the news became public, she says she received a large number of phone calls and messages, while according to her, Socialist Party politicians also sent people to her home to ask the family what was happening.

“I consulted only my conscience and the principles I believe in. They have always shown me the way and helped me not to stray from myself or from the truth.

Only with myself. After I made the decision, I received many messages, many phone calls, and they even sent people to my home to ask around and to find out, to learn more from my family about what was happening and why I had made this decision, from Socialist Party politicians.

And I gave no private communication because it was far too late. I had asked to contact you, I had repeatedly raised requests about the area, about my community. I received no response. The attitudes were indifferent, and that moment after my departure was far too late to talk.

In my capacity as an MP, I contacted all those who have the authority to act for my county, not only local ones but also those at the central level, because I come from an area, as I emphasized, that has been underrepresented, isolated and unknown. In fact, even when I met the prime minister for the first time on the podcast, when I introduced myself and said where I came from and who I was, he admitted to me that he had no idea what was happening in those areas.

And it is not a small area, nor one with little weight in Albania’s history and on its map. And all this lack of state investment and the lack of attention from institutions pushed me, both as a girl and as a young person and resident of those areas, to enter politics, because especially for young people and for women, opportunities were almost impossible,” she said.