Melania Trump lawyer elected Slovenia’s first woman president
LJUBLJANA: Slovenians on Sunday elected a lawyer linked to former US first lady Melania Trump as the country’s first woman president, according to partial results with more than half the votes counted.
Natasa Pirc Musar, backed by the centre-left government, beat ex-foreign minister Anze Logar, a veteran of conservative politics, in a presidential runoff in the EU country of two million people.
Pirc Musar, a lawyer who headed the country’s data protection authority for a decade, won some 54 percent of the vote, ahead of Logar who got nearly 46 per cent, with 55 per cent of ballots counted.
“We need to unify to be able to do something good for our beautiful homeland,” she told reporters at one of her family properties on the outskirts of Ljubljana crowded with supporters as results started to trickle in.
The human rights advocate has vowed to be ‘the voice of women’ in Slovenia and abroad and a ‘moral authority’ in her new role — though the post is largely ceremonial.
“The president cannot be neutral... and have no opinion... I have never been afraid to speak out,” the former television presenter, 54, told AFP ahead of Sunday’s vote.
As a lawyer, Pirc Musar was hired to protect the interests of Slovenian-born Trump during her husband’s presidency, stopping companies attempting to commercialise products with her name.