Zoran Milanović and his ‘normal Croatia’

Magazin: Estilo de Vida Latin America by Claudia M. Gómez – Photo: Zoran Milanović

August 15/2022: This tough man, who has been able to gain followers thanks to some of his programs aimed at favoring the population with fewer economic resources, grew up in a drastically educated home, where, together with his brother, they learned values, as well as several languages, due to the fact that their mother -Durdica- was an English and German teacher.

But they also knew how to extract the maximum juice from the political honey, especially Zoran, who followed the interests of his father, Stipe Milanović, who despite having graduated as an economist, could never escape the political rope; hence he was a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SDK), when Croatia was part of the former Yugoslavia, managed by collegiate governments.

This is how, with this example, Zoran Milanović was becoming an active and consecrated politician since his adolescence. In 1986, after his military service, he enrolled at the University of Zagreb to study law, where he received his law degree in 1990, being the best student of that year, and in 1998 he graduated from the postgraduate course in European Union Law at the Flemish University of Brussels.

His first job was at the Commercial Court in Zagreb and after that he held several diplomatic positions. In 1994, he married Sanja Musić, with whom he had two sons, Ante Jakov and Marko, and in 1999 he joined the Social Democratic Party, which gave him enough arguments to get involved in that world of laws and regulations.

POLITICAL ACTIONS

In 2016 he left parliamentary politics and the presidency of his social democratic party, after having taken the defeat of his allies in the legislative elections of 2015 and 2016 and having served as prime minister for five years, when he presided over the moderate center-left government and inherited – from the previous conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) cabinet – a grim trail of corruption and economic crisis; as well as the EU Treaty of Accession.

However, upon taking office in 2011, Zoran demonstrated not only great capabilities, but also strategies to turn things around. To begin with, he succeeded in making Croatia the eighth member of the European Union on July 1, 2013, thus pulling the country out of recession. He also helped the low-income population to convert their Swiss franc loans into euros and to pay off their debts to banks and companies.

Three years after leaving his position as prime minister, more precisely in 2019, Milanović ran for the Croatian presidency, a high office devoid of executive powers and essentially protocol, with which he makes this country a modern, progressive and open nation.

This is how this man born in Zagreb in 1966, who speaks three languages, English, French and Russian, became the current president of Croatia from 2020 and for five years.