The official results show that Natasa Pirc Musar, a left-wing independent, has won the second round of the Slovenian presidential election, becoming the country’s first female president.
According to figures released by the Slovenian Election Commission, which showed a 97 percent turnout, Musar, backed by the center-left, won 54 percent of the vote in Sunday’s second round, while former Foreign Minister Anze Logar, also an independent, won 46 percent of the vote.
The central electoral commission has not yet received votes cast abroad, but these are not expected to have a significant impact on the result, which means Musar’s victory is a certainty.
According to the electoral commission, 52.13 percent of the eligible voters in the second round, some 855,000 people, went to the polls, slightly more than in the first round. The new head of state is expected to be sworn in on Dec. 23.
Musar ran on a ticket of reforming the health and pension systems, the fight against climate change, and a firmer security and defense policy.
Natasa Pirc Musar, 54, was born in Ljubljana in 1968. She graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana in 1992. She started her career as a journalist. She worked for the Slovenian public television (RTV) for six years and then for POP TV, Slovenia’s largest commercial channel, for another five years. She then worked as an intern at CNN in the United States and spent two semesters studying media studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, where she also interned at the BBC.
In 2001, she moved into the private sector, spending two years as head of communications at Aktiva Group, Slovenia’s largest financial company at the time. In 2003, she joined the country’s Supreme Court. She opened a law firm in 2014 and has been working as a lawyer since then. Musar has been a member and president of several international organizations, specializing in media law and human rights in general.
She is married with one child.
