Zoran Milanović facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Zoran Milanović
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Milanović in 2021
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| President of Croatia | |
| Assumed office 19 February 2020 |
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| Prime Minister | Andrej Plenković |
| Preceded by | Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović |
| Prime Minister of Croatia | |
| In office 23 December 2011 – 22 January 2016 |
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| President | Ivo Josipović Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović |
| Deputy | Radimir Čačić Branko Grčić Milanka Opačić Vesna Pusić |
| Preceded by | Jadranka Kosor |
| Succeeded by | Tihomir Orešković |
| Leader of the Opposition | |
| In office 22 January 2016 – 26 November 2016 |
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| Prime Minister | Tihomir Orešković Andrej Plenković |
| Preceded by | Tomislav Karamarko |
| Succeeded by | Davor Bernardić |
| In office 2 June 2007 – 23 December 2011 |
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| Prime Minister | Ivo Sanader Jadranka Kosor |
| Preceded by | Ivica Račan Željka Antunović (Acting) |
| Succeeded by | Jadranka Kosor |
| President of the Social Democratic Party | |
| In office 2 June 2007 – 26 November 2016 |
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| Deputy | Zlatko Komadina Gordan Maras Milanka Opačić Rajko Ostojić |
| Preceded by | Ivica Račan Željka Antunović (Acting) |
| Succeeded by | Davor Bernardić |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 30 October 1966 Zagreb, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia |
| Political party | Independent (2020–present) |
| Other political affiliations |
Social Democratic Party (1999–2020) |
| Spouse |
Sanja Musić
(m. 1994) |
| Children | 2 |
| Parents |
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| Alma mater |
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| Signature |  |
Zoran Milanović ( born 30 October 1966) is a Croatian politician who has been serving as the president of Croatia since 2020. Prior to assuming the presidency, he was prime minister of Croatia from 2011 to 2016, as well as the president of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) from 2007 to 2016.
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Background
His father, Stipe Milanović (1937–2019), was an economist, and his mother, Đurđica "Gina" (née Matasić), a former teacher of English and German. His paternal family hails from the Sinj environs. He stated that his father's family roots going back a century or two are from Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His paternal grandfather and paternal great-uncle, Ante and Ivan Milanović, respectively, from Glavice, joined the Yugoslav Partisans in 1942, taking part later in the liberation of Trieste. His maternal family Matasić is an old Senj bourgeois family, with some distant roots in Lika, Gacka valley. His maternal grandmother and grandfather were Marija (née Glavaš) and Stjepan Matasić, respectively. Their daughter Đurđica, Milanović's mother, was born and raised in Senj with three other siblings. Stjepan Matasić was killed in 1943 when the Allies bombed German-occupied Senj. Marija then moved with her children to Sušak, where she met Petar Plišić, a blacksmith from Ličko Lešće, whom she married and moved together with him to Zagreb, where they raised Đurđica and the rest of her siblings. Plišić, was—as Milanović revealed in 2016—an Ustasha, a member of the paramilitary corps established by the Nazi-collaborationist government of the Independent State of Croatia. After World War II, he served two years in Stara Gradiška prison before being released.
Zoran's father was a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ). Milanović was baptized secretly by his maternal grandmother Marija at the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Zagreb, and given the baptismal name Marijan. He was brought up in the neighbourhoods of Knežija, and after 1970 in Trnje, a communist quarter. He had a brother, Krešimir, who died in 2019. Milanović attended the Center for Management and Judiciary from 1981. Milanović partook in sports, including football, basketball and boxing. He declared himself as a leftist. In 1985, he entered the University of Zagreb to study law, then finished his military service, and returned to study in 1986. There is evidence that Milanović too joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1985.
After college, Milanović became an intern at the Zagreb Commercial Court, and in 1993 for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working under future political rival Ivo Sanader. A year later, he joined an OSCE peacekeeping mission in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, disputed between Armenian natives and Azerbaijan. In 1994, he married his wife Sanja Musić, with whom he has two sons: Ante Jakov, and Marko. Apart from Croatian, he speaks English, French, and Russian.
Milanović is a fan of the Croatian football club Hajduk Split.
Early career
After graduating from university , Milanović started working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as Advisor at the Croatian mission to the European Union and NATO in Brussels from 1996 to 1999. During the same year, he joined the SDP. In 1998, he earned his master's degree in European Union law at the Free University Brussels and was an assistant to the Croatian foreign minister 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 Račan. Under Milanović's leadership the party finished in second place in the 2007 Croatian parliamentary election and was unable to form a majority government. Despite losing the election, he was reelected party leader in 2008. In 2011, Milanović initiated the formation of the Kukuriku Coalition, uniting four centre to centre-left political parties. The coalition won an absolute majority in the 2011 Croatian parliamentary election, with the SDP itself becoming the largest party in the Croatian Parliament. Milanović became Prime Minister on 23 December 2011 after the Parliament approved his cabinet.
Prime Minister (2011–2016)
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Taking office at the age of 45, Milanović became one of the youngest prime ministers since Croatia's independence. In addition, his cabinet also became the youngest, with an average minister's age of 48. Milanović was reelected as president of the SDP in the 2012 leadership election as the only candidate.
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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 the 2012 Croatian European Union 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. Milanović supported the expansion of same-sex couples' rights and introduced the Life Partnership Act. After the inconclusive 2015 Croatian parliamentary election and more than two months of negotiations on forming a government, he was ultimately succeeded as prime minister by the nonpartisan technocrat Tihomir Orešković in January 2016.
Post-premiership
After Orešković's government fell, Milanović led the four-party People's Coalition in the 2016 Croatian parliamentary election in September. In the election, his coalition suffered a surprise defeat to the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union and Milanović 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, Milanović announced that he would be running in the 2019–20 Croatian presidential election as the candidate of the SDP; he was officially nominated on 6 July. He received the most votes (29.55%) in the first round of the election on 22 December 2019, ahead of incumbent president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (26.65%), and was 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.
Presidency (2020–present)
The inauguration of Milanović as the 5th president of Croatia took place on 18 February 2020. This was the first time that a presidential inauguration ceremony in Croatia was not held at St. Mark's Square in the city center of Zagreb, where the parliament and government buildings are located. Instead, Milanović decided to forgo the usual pomp of the ceremony by inviting merely some 40 guests, including state officials, former presidents, his family and members of his campaign team. This was also the first time that party leaders, diplomats and church dignitaries did not attend a presidential inauguration. The ceremony began with the performance of the national anthem by renowned Croatian pop and jazz diva Josipa Lisac, accompanied by pianist Zvjezdan Ružić, whose alternative rendition of Croatia's national anthem struck a different tone to the national anthem's usual sombre, bombastic delivery. This caused a lot of positive comments and negative reactions, which resulted in an unprecedented public debate about the national anthem and artistic freedom.
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Milanović made his first trip abroad as president on 27 February 2020 to Otočec ob Krki, Slovenia, where he met with president Borut Pahor. The two of them firmly concluded that they would do everything to improve and make the relations between the two countries excellent, pointing out that they had known each other for over 16 years. They also discussed about the border issue between the two countries, Croatian accession to the Schengen Area and about the border controls implemented by the Croatian government due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Milanović also addressed the European perspective of Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia.
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During the summer, Milanović visited Montenegro and met with president Milo Đukanović. He also canceled his planned trip to Russia, where president Vladimir Putin invited him to attend the 2020 Victory Day parade.
In January 2021, Milanović refused to participate in a ceremony commemorating the 1993 Operation Maslenica because the Croatian Defence Forces′ symbols were to be displayed. In September 2021, he publicly voiced his opinion that Bunjevci are Croatians. The national council of Bunjevci responded harshly to his statements, stating that Bunjevci had been living in Subotica for 350 years and that the difference between Bunjevci and Croats was clearly attested by historical sources.
In November 2021, Austria's foreign ministry summoned the Croatian ambassador in Vienna, Daniel Glunčić, to give an explanation, after Milanović compared the lockdown in Austria to the methods employed in the era of Nazism.
Finnish and Swedish NATO accession
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In April 2022, Milanović suggested blocking Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO until the electoral law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would allow Bosniaks the option of electing a Croat member of the Presidency and Croat representatives in the House of Peoples of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was changed. He went on to say that he would label as a political traitor every member of Croatia's Parliament, the Sabor, who refused to vote against the expansion of NATO. On 28 April 2022, Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić-Radman announced that Croatia supports Finland and Sweden's applications for membership in NATO.
In May 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opposed Finland and Sweden's NATO membership, and in June 2022 withdrew the objections of the two countries membership process. After Finland's foreign minister Pekka Haavisto stated that his country was shocked by Milanović's statements, Milanović responded by saying: "Welcome to the club, mister foreign minister. We have been shocked for several years already by your ignorance and rudeness". However, the Finnish Minister for European Affairs and Ownership Steering Tytti Tuppurainen later commented that, although the citizens of Finland were confused by Milanović's statements, Finland understood the Croatian concern about the reforms of the electoral law in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that Finland supported the international efforts regarding the changes of the electoral law. His prior comments notwithstanding, Milanović did not veto Finnish and Swedish NATO accession at the 2022 NATO Madrid summit.
2024 parliamentary election
On 15 March 2024, Milanović announced his candidacy for the office of Prime Minister on the SDP list in the parliamentary election.
Honours
| Ribbon | Distinction | Country | Date | Location | Notes | Reference |
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Order of Merit with a collar |  Chile |
12 December 2022 | Santiago | Highest civil decoration in Chile |
See also
In Spanish: Zoran Milanović para niños
- Cabinet of Zoran Milanović
- List of international presidential trips made by Zoran Milanović
