Zoran Milanović
Zoran Milanović is a Croatian politician who is the current president of Croatia. First elected in 2020, he was re-elected in 2025 with 74% voter support. Prior to assuming the presidency, he was the prime minister of Croatia from 2011 to 2016, as well as the president of the Social Democratic Party from 2007 to 2016.
After graduating from the Zagreb Faculty of Law, 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 of 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.
The beginning of his prime ministership was marked by efforts to finalise the ratification process of Croatia's entry into the EU and by the holding of 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. After Orešković's government fell, Milanović led the four-party People's Coalition in the 2016 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 in the first round of the election on 22 December 2019, ahead of incumbent president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, and was elected president 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.
Background
His father, Stipe Milanović, was an economist, and his mother, Đurđica "Gina", 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 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—a Ustaša, 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. 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. 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.
Party president
In 1999, he joined the Social Democratic Party as he had not yet been an official member. Following SDP's win in the 2000 elections, he was given responsibility for liaison with NATO; three years later he became assistant to Foreign Minister Tonino Picula. He left his post after the 2003 elections when the conservative Croatian Democratic Union came to power. As an SDP member, in 2004 he renounced his position as an assistant minister of foreign affairs and became a member of the newly founded SDP's executive committee as well as the International Secretary in charge of contacts with other political parties. Two years later, he briefly became party spokesman, standing in for absent Gordana Grbić. In early September 2006 he became SDP's coordinator for the 4th constituency in the 2007 elections.An extraordinary party convention was held in Zagreb on 2 June 2007, due to 11 April resignation of the first party president and Croatia's former prime minister Ivica Račan. Milanović entered the contest, despite being considered an "outsider", because of his shorter term in the party, running against Željka Antunović, Milan Bandić and Tonino Picula. On 29 September 2007, during the campaign for party president, he publicly promised to resign and never to seek presidency of the party again, if the party did not win more seats than HDZ in next elections. In the first round he led with 592, well ahead of his nearest rival, Željka Antunović. He won the second round, thereby becoming president of the party.
2007 parliamentary election
The 2007 parliamentary election turned out to be the closest election since independence with SDP winning 56 seats, only 10 mandates short of HDZ's 66. 5 seats that HDZ had won were from the eleventh district reserved for citizens living abroad, which was one of the main campaign issues of SDP which sought to decrease electoral significance of the so-called diaspora voters. The resulting close race left both sides in a position to form a government, provided they could gather 77 of the 153 representatives. After the election, Sanader seemed to be in a better position to form a cabinet which caused Milanović to make himself the candidate for prime minister over the less popular Ljubo Jurčić, without first consulting the party's Main Committee. However, the Social Democrats remained in the Opposition, since Ivo Sanader managed to form a majority coalition.After losing the hotly contested general elections, Milanović did not resign as party president, despite promising before the election that he would, should the party lose. In the 2007 election, despite the loss, SDP emerged with the largest parliamentary caucus in their history and achieved their best result yet. Milanović seemed to be in a good position to remain party president and announced he would run for a first full term as party president. In the 2008 leadership election he faced Davorko Vidović and Dragan Kovačević, but emerged as the winner with almost 80 percent of the delegate vote.
First term as Leader of the Opposition (2007–2011)
With 56 seats won, SDP emerged from the 2007 election as the second largest party in Parliament and the largest party that is not a part of the governing majority. This made Milanović the unofficial leader of the opposition. Milanović was very critical of the Sanader administration, especially concerning their handling of the economy and the fight against corruption.In September 2008, Milanović made a highly publicized visit to Bleiburg to commemorate the victims of the Yugoslav Communists. This made him the second leader of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia to visit the site, the first being Ivica Račan.
The 2009 local elections were held on 17 and 31 May and resulted in the Social Democrats making considerable gains in certain traditionally HDZ-leaning cities and constituencies, such as Dubrovnik, Šibenik, Trogir and Vukovar, as well as retaining such major traditionally SDP-leaning cities as Zagreb, Varaždin and Rijeka.
On 1 July 2009, Ivo Sanader announced he was resigning the premiership and leaving his deputy Jadranka Kosor as prime minister. Parliament approved her and the new cabinet which made Kosor the first Croatian woman ever to be appointed prime minister. Since late 2008, the SDP had been leading the polls, however by a narrow margin. After the sudden resignation of Sanader HDZ plummeted in the polls to their lowest level since 1999 when corruption scandals were rocking the party establishment. Milanović insisted the resignation of the prime minister means that an early general election was necessary. The governing majority refused to dissolve Parliament and insisted that the Kosor cabinet would finish the remainder of its term.
File:Kukuriku.jpg|thumb|Milanović with Ivan Jakovčić, Radimir Čačić and Silvano Hrelja announcing the formation of the Kukuriku coalition, 15 July 2011
In 2008 the country's accession to the European Union was deadlocked with the Slovenian blockade over a border dispute. Sanader and his Slovenian counterpart Borut Pahor were unable to settle their differences in the following months which meant Croatia's accession to the European Union was in a standstill. There was much speculation, since Sanader had not given a reason for his departure, whether the Slovenian blockade was the cause for his resignation. In the following months Kosor and Pahor met several times, trying to resolve the border dispute. The negotiations resulted in an agreement which led to the continuation of negotiations for the Croatian accession to the European Union. The solution was an Arbitration Agreement which was signed in Stockholm on 4 November 2009, by both countries' prime ministers and the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. The agreement required a two-thirds majority in Parliament for it to be approved. Milanović and most SDP MPs voted in favor of the agreement, however he criticized the Government and especially its former and present leaders, Sanader and Kosor, for wasting precious time since the arrangement with Slovenia could have been made a year earlier and Croatia would not have waited so long to continue with the accession process.
The 2008 financial crisis affected most European countries, including Croatia. Industry shed tens of thousands of jobs, and unemployment soared. Consumer spending reduced drastically compared to record 2007 levels, causing widespread problems in the trade as well as transport industries. The continuing declining standard resulted in a quick fall in both the prime minister's as well as government's support. Milanović was very critical of the Government's supposed slow response and inadequate measures that did little to revive the economy. The recession and high unemployment continued throughout 2011 resulting in many anti-government protests around the country.