Zoran Milanovic

Zoran Milanovic (born 30 October 1966) is a Croatian politician serving as President of Croatia since 2020. Prior to assuming the presidency, he was President of the Social Democratic Party from 2007 to 2016 and Prime Minister of Croatia from 2011 to 2016. After graduating from the Zagreb Faculty of Law, Milanovic started working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as an advisor at the Croatian Mission to the European Union and NATO in Brussels from 1996 to 1999. During the same year he joined the Social Democratic Party. In 1998 he earned his master's degree in European Union law at the Flemish University in Brussels and was an assistant to the Foreign Minister of Croatia for political multilateral affairs in 2003. In June 2007 he was elected President of the SDP, following the death of the long-time party leader and former Prime Minister Ivica Racan. Under Milanovic's leadership the party finished in second place in the 2007 parliamentary election and was unable to form a governing majority. Despite losing the election, he was reelected party leader in 2008. In 2011 Milanovic initiated the formation of the Kukuriku Coalition, uniting four centre to centre-left political parties. The coalition won an absolute majority in the 2011 parliamentary election, with the SDP itself becoming the largest party in Parliament. Milanovic thus became Prime Minister on 23 December 2011, after the Parliament approved his cabinet. The beginning of his prime ministership was marked by efforts to finalise the ratification process of Croatia's entry into the European Union and by the holding of a membership referendum. His cabinet introduced changes to the tax code, passed a fiscalisation law and started several large infrastructure projects. After the increase in the value of the Swiss franc, the government announced that all Swiss franc loans would be converted into euros. Milanovic supported the expansion of same-sex couples' rights and introduced the Life Partnership Act. After the inconclusive 2015 election and more than two months of negotiations on forming a government, he was ultimately succeeded as Prime Minister by the nonpartisan technocrat Tihomir Oreskovic in January 2016. After Oreskovic's government fell, Milanovic led the four-party People's Coalition in the subsequent snap parliamentary election in September 2016. In the election, his coalition suffered a surprise defeat to the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union and Milanovic announced his withdrawal from politics. He then entered the consulting business and worked as an advisor to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. On 17 June 2019, Milanovic announced that he would be running for the office of President in the 2019-20 election as the candidate of the Social Democratic Party; he was officially nominated on 6 July 2019. He thereafter proceeded to receive the most votes (29.55%) in the first round of the election on 22 December 2019, ahead of incumbent President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (26.65%) and to be elected as the fifth President of Croatia in the runoff on 5 January 2020, with 52.66% of the vote. He became the first presidential candidate in Croatian history to receive more votes than an incumbent officeholder in the first round of an election, the second person in Croatia to defeat an incumbent running for reelection and the first (post-independence) Prime Minister of Croatia to be elected head of state.