Nataša Pirc Musar to become Slovenia’s first female president

A liberal lawyer and former data privacy commissioner backed by Slovenia's centre-left government has been elected the country's first female president after beating her conservative rival in a runoff vote on Sunday.

Logar, a foreign minister in the last government of the rightwing populist former prime minister Janez Janša, had won the first round in October without gaining the required majority.

But polls over the past few weeks had indicated popular support rallying around Pirc Musar. There were suggestions that Logar was suffering after failing to distance himself from his former boss, a divisive figure and close ally of Hungary's far-right leader Viktor Orbán.

Slovenia's environmentalist prime minister, Robert Golob, who succeeded Janša this June, had warned that a vote for the conservative candidate would plunge his country back into "dark times". Turnout at Sunday's vote was up on the last election in 2017, at 50.6%.

A former journalist and presenter on Slovenia's main news programme, Ljubljana-born Pirc Musar gained additional training at CNN and Salford University's media department before completing a PhD in law at Vienna University. She was elected as Slovenia's commissioner for access to public information in 2004.

She was also hired to protect the interests of Slovenian-born Melania Trump during her husband's US presidency, stopping companies attempting to commercialise products with her name.

During the election campaign much media attention has focused on the lucrative network of companies owned by her and her husband, amid allegations that they had put some of their fortune into tax havens.