Slovenia – Slovenia held the second round of its presidential election last Sunday. Voters had to decide between the top two candidates after the first round that had taken place on 23 October: Anže Logar (SDS), who had obtained 34% of the vote and who is an ally of former conservative Prime Minister Janez Janša, and Nataša Pirc Musar, who had obtained 26.9% of the vote and was supported by the left-wing government of Robert Golob.
The second round of voting saw the left-wing, liberal candidate win with 53.9% of the vote, against 46.1% for her conservative opponent. After Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, president of Croatia from 2015 to 2020, Zuzana Čaputová, president of Slovakia since June 2019, and Katalin Novák, president of Hungary since May 2022, Slovenia will now be another Central European country whose head of state is a woman.
Nataša Pirc Musar has worked as a lawyer and journalist. She was a news anchor for Slovenian public television and later for the private channel POP TV. She went on to serve as chair of the Europol Joint Supervisory Body from 2012 to 2014, before founding a law firm in 2016, with one of her famous clients being former U.S. First Lady Melania Trump, who was born as Melanija Knavs in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia.
In her first speech following her victory, Pirc Musar, who will take office on 23 December, said: “I will do my best to be truly a president for all. I will work hard for human rights and democracy, and I will make great efforts to ensure that we agree on strategic issues in politics. (…)
Slovenia will have a president who believes in the European Union and the values upon which it was built.”
