Liberal lawyer wins Slovenian presidential election: partial results

Preliminary results show the liberal lawyer and former TV presenter with an eight-point lead over his conservative rival.

Natasa Pirc Musar, a liberal lawyer and former TV presenter, is on her way to becoming Slovenia’s first female president after preliminary results showed the 54-year-old won the presidential runoff.

Pirc Musar, backed by the centre-left government, won 54 percent of the vote in Sunday’s second round, while her rival, right-wing politician and former foreign minister Anze Logar, won 46 percent, according to electoral commission data based on 77 percent of votes. votes counted.

“We need to unite so that we can do something good for our beautiful homeland,” he said at one of his family’s properties outside the capital, Ljubljana. He was packed with followers when the results started coming in.

The human rights defender has vowed to be “the voice of women” in Slovenia and abroad and a “moral authority” in her new role, which is largely a ceremonial one.

“The president cannot be neutral… and have no opinion,” Pirc Musar, who led the data protection authority for a decade, told the AFP news agency ahead of Sunday’s vote. “…I have never been afraid to speak up.”

As a lawyer, Pirc Musar was hired to protect the interests of Slovenian-born Melania Trump during her husband’s US presidency by preventing companies from trying to market products under her name.

During the campaign, Pirc Musar came under fire for her husband’s lucrative investments, especially in tax havens.

The results mark a new setback for conservatives in Slovenia, a European Union country of 2 million people.

Logar, 46, ran as an independent but is a longtime member of Janez Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, which failed in its bid to be re-elected as prime minister in April.

Critics accused Jansa of attacking media freedom and the judiciary and undermining the rule of law in his last term.