PRESIDENT OF SLOVENIA: Nataša Pirc Musar - journalist who punished Zoran Janković and became a serious lawyer

(Patria) - The first woman at the helm of Slovenia will be Nataša Pirc Musar. She celebrated quite convincingly in the second round of the presidential election, where her rival was Anže Logar. 

Nataša Pirc Musar was born in 1968 in Ljubljana, where she graduated in law. In one interview, she revealed that she hesitated between medicine and law, and that the latter won because she cannot stand blood. After completing her studies in the early 1990s, she started working at Radiotelevizija Slovenija, where she hosted the central TV Dnevnik, and then moved to the largest Slovenian commercial television station POP TV, where she edited and hosted the main news program 24ur for five years.

Having already passed the bar exam, Pirc Musar further honed her journalistic skills by training at CNN, BBC, Granada TV, Sky News, and Reuters TV, while simultaneously writing journalistic articles and reporting for numerous radio stations.

After mastering all journalistic forms, Pirc Musar moved into the business sector in 2001, heading the corporate communications department at Aktiva Group, the largest Slovenian financial company, which was quite active in the country's privatizations.

She left that job after two years and joined the Slovenian Supreme Court as director of the Center for Education and Information at a time when Slovenia was adopting the law on the right to access public information. Her job was to make everything transparent, and she emphasized the importance of ensuring the right to information in line with Western standards. The Slovenian Parliament then, in 2004, on the proposal of then-President Janez Drnovšek, appointed her as Commissioner for Access to Information of Public Importance, a role she continued during the presidential term of Danilo Türk. In this capacity, she oversaw the work of the government, parliament, courts, and all other public authorities in Slovenia.

During her tenure in that position, she enjoyed enormous trust from Slovenian citizens, who considered the commission one of the few that punishes politicians. Pirc Musar thus fined the party Positive Slovenia 4,170 euros, whose president and current mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, had photographed himself with schoolchildren for political purposes without parental permission. She slapped Janez Janša with a 5,000 euro fine for publishing court documents from proceedings in which he was a defendant, along with data on his co-defendants, and fined Dimitrij Rupel, as foreign minister, 1,660 euros for violating the privacy of ministry officials by listing phone calls in an attempt to uncover communication with Americans about the recognition of Kosovo. Additionally, she fined 150 curious tax officials 50 euros each for unauthorized viewing of tax files.

She then became one of the most recognizable lawyers in Slovenia, and also represented Melania Trump, the wife of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The private life of Pirc Musar is, predictably, not as transparent. She is married to Aleš and has a son named Maks. In her free time, she engages in pastry making, and occasionally rides an enduro motorcycle to Bled. For longer motorcycle trips, she claims, she lacks the stamina.