Rudina Hajdari is a 2022 Atlantic Council Millennium Leadership fellow and a former member of parliament aligned with the Democratic Party of Albania. Since March 12, 2019, when the Democratic Party of Albania gave up their mandates en bloc, Hajdari has decided to remain in parliament. She created her own parliamentary group called the Democrat Group. Since then, she has chaired the European Integration Committee and the Ad Hoc Committee on Election Reform. Formerly, she was also a member of the Foreign Policy Committee. Her primary policy interests are government relations, policy development, and human rights.

Hajdari has also served as a part-time lecturer at the University of Tirana in the Department of Political Science, where she taught about public policy. She has also been a guest lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute at the US Department of State. Previously, Hajdari lived in the United States, where she migrated at a young age without her family due to political turmoil in Albania in the late 1990s. She is a US citizen and has worked as a staff associate to the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs for Representative Eliot L. Engel (D-NY).

In 2017, Hajdari returned to Albania from the United States in the hopes of helping revive the Democratic Party and restore the country from the tainted allegations of corruption and bad governance.

Hajdari holds master’s degrees in geopolitics, territory, and security from King’s College in London and in human rights studies from Columbia University. In addition, Hajdari holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Fordham University. Hajdari’s editorials have been published in both English and Albanian by leading international media outlets.