After defeating her conservative opponent in a runoff election on Sunday, Natasa Pirc Musar, a liberal lawyer and former data privacy commissioner supported by Slovenia’s center-left government was chosen as the nation’s first female president.
With 99% of the votes in, Pirc Musar had 53.8% of the vote over conservative veteran Ane Logar’s 46.1%, giving her the lead. Both candidates were supported by the center-left and right-wing political blocs of the small, 2 million-person country in eastern Europe that has been a member of the EU for 15 years, despite the fact that they had both run as independents.
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The first round was won by Logar in October despite falling short of the necessary majority. Logar served as foreign minister in the previous administration of right-wing populist former prime minister Janez Jana.
Who is Natasa Pirc Musar?
Natasa Pirc Musar, born on May 9, 1968, is a Slovenian lawyer, author of books, former information commissioner (2004–2014), journalist, and previous leader of Slovenia’s Red Cross (2015-2016).
She is most recognised for her judgments, books, and high-profile legal battles in which she defended Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born woman, the Social Democrats political party, and other noteworthy clients. She won the second round of Slovenia’s presidential elections in November 2022, becoming the country’s first female leader.
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Pirc Musar was supervised by Marko Ilesic while she was a student at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law in 1992. She passed the bar test in 1997 and afterwards secured employment at Television Slovenia, where she spent six years as a journalist and host of the main news programme. She then served as the host of the main news programme 24UR for five years on the pay television network POP TV.
At CNN in Atlanta, Pirc Musar completed more training. She subsequently continued her studies at Salford University in Manchester for two semesters, working as an intern there for the BBC, Granada TV, Sky News, Reuters TV, and Border TV.
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With a dissertation on striking a reasonable balance between privacy rights and the openness of information, she earned her PhD from the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Law.
She become leadership of the corporate communication division at the Aktiva Group, where her husband Ale Musar worked, in 2001. She graduated with a PhD in law from the University of Vienna in 2015.
She declared her candidacy for Slovenian President in the upcoming 2022 election, which is set for October 23, 2022, as an independent candidate on June 23, 2022.
She was the first to declare her intention to run for president, and former Slovenian presidents Milan Kucan and Danilo Türk supported her. Pirc Musar has never belonged to a political party and has no intention of doing so. She defended her campaign as an independent while receiving support from groups like the Pirate Party and the Youth Party-European Greens.
The vice president of the ruling party, Marta Kos, who later declared her candidacy for the position of president of the country, generated a great deal of media curiosity regarding their relationship as a result of her announcement.
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Despite declaring to be friends, Kos and Pirc Musar reportedly ceased speaking with one another. Kos dropped her bid in September 2022, which boosted Pirc Musar’s popularity as he was already in the lead.
As a result of her second-place finish in the first round of the presidential elections in October, she will be one of the two candidates in the run-off in November 2022.
Ales Musar, a businessman, is her husband and they have a son together. The couple owns a Rolls Royce Phantom VI limousine that was manufactured in 1971 and was formerly owned by Princess Alexandra, a member of the British royal family, and are the owners of the Russian dacha in Zgornje Gameljne.
