30 Unique Facts Everyone Should Know About Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović

15 February 2019, 7:57 am EST By Ruby Karnick

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, the 4th and current President of Croatia, has held the office since 2015. She started her career in politics in the year 1992, but turned heads with her strong performance in the first round of the presidential election held in December 2014, which was widely considered to be totally unexpected. Here are some really interesting things to know about the Croatian politician and diplomat:

She is the first woman to be elected to the office of the President of Croatia, since the first multi-party elections in 1990.
She became the President of Croatia, at the age of 46, making her the youngest person to assume the presidency in the history of the country.
She served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration from 2005 to 2008, the first female to have held the position.
She was the only female candidate, out of the four candidates of the presidential election held in December 2014 and January 2015, in which she finished as a runner-up in the first round and narrowly defeating Ivo Josipović in the second round.
The 1.114 million votes Grabar-Kitarović received in the second round of 2014–15 Croatian presidential election, is the lowest number of votes for any winning candidate in Croatia, as well as the 1.48% victory margin against Josipović is the smallest in any such election to date.
She was a member of the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party from 1993 to 2015 and was also one of the three Croatian members of the Trilateral Commission from 2013 to 2015, but had to resign from both the positions upon taking office as president.
She was listed as the world's 39th and the 47th most powerful woman by Forbes magazine in the year 2017 and 2018.
Kolinda Grabar was born on April 29, 1968 in Rijeka, Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia to parents Branko Grabar and Dubravka.
She was mainly raised in Lopača, just north of Rijeka, where her family owned a ranch and a butcher shop.
She moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico at the age 17, later graduating from Los Alamos High School in 1986.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Spanish languages and literature degree in the year 1993, from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia.
She went to Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in Austria, to attend a Diploma course from 1995 to 1996. She earned a master's degree in international relations from the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb, in the tear 2000.
She, as a Fulbright scholar, attended George Washington University in 2002-2003, while at the same time, she was a visiting scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
She began her doctoral studies in international relations at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Science, in December 2015.
She started her career as an advisor to the international cooperation department of the Ministry of Science and Technology in the year 1992.
Grabar-Kitarović first joined the Croatian Democratic Union in 1993, and was transferred to become an advisor in Foreign ministry. Two years later, she became the head of the North American department of the Foreign ministry.
In the year 1997, she started to work at the Croatian embassy in Canada as a diplomatic councilor, a position she held until October 1998, before becoming a minister-councilor.
Following the 2000 elections, when Tonino Picula became Minister of Foreign Affairs, she was ordered to return to Croatia from Canada, within a span of six weeks, which she refused as she was pregnant and planned to give birth in Canada. However, returned after being pressurized by the ministry.
During her stay there, she applied for Fulbright scholarship at the George Washington University to study international relations and security policy. She moved to United States and following her graduation, returned to live in Rijeka.
She was elected by the international community to preside over the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention's Sixth Meeting of the States Parties, or Ottawa Treaty, on November 28, 2005.

With the 2014–15 Croatian presidential election, she became the first woman in Europe to defeat an incumbent president running for reelection, while she is the second woman in the world to do so, after Violetta Chamorro of Nicaragua in 1990.
She is the first candidate of any gender to defeat an incumbent Croatian president, and also to have won the election without having the most votes in the first round of elections.
With just nine months into her term, the European migrant crisis began to escalate with large numbers of migrants entering Greece and Macedonia and crossing from Serbia into Hungary.
She made an official visit to Baku, Azerbaijan in October 2016, expressing her support for the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Grabar-Kitarović, during the 2018 FIFA World Cup held in Russia, attended the quarter-final and final matches, supporting the national team by wearing colors of the national flag.
She reportedly travelled to Russia at her own expense in economy class and watched the games from the non-VIP stands, for both the games.
According to Mediatoolkit, an analytics company, she was the "country’s star of the tournament" with "25% more focus on her in news stories about the final than any of the players on the pitch."
She openly opposes same-sex marriage, but has expressed her support for the Life Partnership Act that enables same-sex couples to enjoy rights equal to heterosexual married couples.
She has always been outspoken in support of green initiatives along with the dangers of climate change for the environment and global security, and in the year 2016, signed the Paris Agreement at UN Headquarters in New York City.
She is married to Jakov Kitarović since the year 1996. The couple have two children - a daughter Katarina, who is professional figure skater, the current Croatia's national junior champion, and a son Luka.