Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović: From a Lika Village to NATO's Top Table

At the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow, soaked to the skin in the rain, the President of Croatia embraced every player of both teams in turn. She had travelled to Russia at her own expense, in economy class. The media analytics firm Mediatoolkit found she generated more coverage than the footballers did. It was the most-watched thing she ever did, and it told you almost nothing about how she had got there.

Lopača to Los Alamos

She was born in Rijeka on 29 April 1968 and raised mainly in Lopača, where her family kept a butcher's shop and a ranch. At seventeen she left on a student exchange for Los Alamos, New Mexico, and graduated from Los Alamos High School in 1986 — a Yugoslav teenager finishing school in the town that built the bomb.

The Credential Collector

What followed was an unusually deliberate accumulation of qualifications. A degree in English and Spanish from the University of Zagreb in 1993; the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in 1995–96; a master's in international relations from Zagreb's Faculty of Political Science in 2000. Then, as a Fulbright scholar, George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in 2002–03, a Luksic Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting scholarship at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies. She is fluent in Croatian, English, Spanish and Portuguese, with working German, French and Italian.

Up Through the Ministry

She joined the Ministry of Science and Technology as an adviser in 1992 and moved to the Foreign Ministry in 1993, heading its North American department from 1995 and serving at the Croatian embassy in Canada from 1997, eventually as deputy chief of mission. In 2000 she was ordered home after the Social Democrats won power and cleared out appointees of the HDZ.

She returned as a minister. From 22 December 2003 to February 2005 she ran European Integration, leading Croatia's EU accession negotiations; from February 2005 to 12 January 2008 she was Foreign Minister, the first woman to hold the post. In November 2005 she presided over the Sixth Meeting of States Parties to the Ottawa landmine treaty in Zagreb, the first woman to do so. Her abrupt removal in January 2008 has never been explained.

Washington and Brussels

As Croatian Ambassador to the United States from March 2008, she was present on 24 October 2008 when the NATO accession protocols for Croatia and Albania were presented alongside President George W. Bush and Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In July 2011 she became NATO's Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy — the first woman ever to hold an assistant secretary general post in the alliance's history. Colleagues nicknamed her SWAMBO: She Who Must Be Obeyed. She was elected to the Trilateral Commission in April 2013.

President

Standing for the HDZ, she trailed the incumbent Ivo Josipović in the first round in December 2014, 37.2 per cent to 38.5, and beat him in the runoff on 11 January 2015 with 50.7 per cent — a margin of 1.48 points. Sworn in on 15 February 2015 at forty-six, she was the youngest person ever to hold the office and the first woman elected to it since Croatia's first multi-party elections in 1990.

Her most durable initiative was the Three Seas Initiative, floated at an Atlantic Council meeting in New York on 29 September 2015 and formally launched with Polish President Andrzej Duda the following year, its first summit held in Dubrovnik that August — a Central European infrastructure bloc between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas that has outlived her presidency. During the 2015 refugee crisis, with more than 21,000 migrants having entered Croatia by 19 September, she appointed Andrija Hebrang as commissioner.

The Contested Record

Her presidency ran repeatedly into Croatia's unfinished argument with its wartime past. In August 2015 she rejected a petition to adopt the salute *Za dom spremni* for official use by the armed forces, calling it frivolous, unacceptable and provocative — while also describing it as a Croatian historical greeting that had been compromised. Historians objected, and she acknowledged she had been wrong about its history. A March 2018 speech in Argentina, in which she said that after the Second World War many Croats had found there a space of freedom in which to testify to their patriotism, was read by observers including Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center as sympathy for Ustaše émigrés; she rejected what she called malicious interpretations. After the convicted war criminal Slobodan Praljak killed himself in the courtroom at The Hague in 2017, she described him as a man who preferred to give his life rather than live convicted of crimes he firmly believed he had not committed, and said the act left the tribunal with the weight of eternal doubt. She has said she condemns all totalitarian regimes, including nazism, fascism and communism.

Defeat

She announced her re-election bid on 2 October 2019 under the slogan "Because I believe in Croatia." In the first round on 22 December, Zoran Milanović took 29.55 per cent, she 26.65 — 507,626 votes, the lowest recorded by any sitting Croatian president in either round — and Miroslav Škoro 24.45. She squeezed past Škoro by 2.2 points and lost the runoff on 5 January 2020, 47.3 to 52.66. She left office on 18 February 2020, the second Croatian president denied a second term.

Why Kolinda Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on career architecture rather than intellect, and it should be described that way. The distance travelled is genuinely remarkable: a butcher's daughter from a village in Lika became NATO's first female assistant secretary general and Croatia's first elected woman president, assembling a Vienna diplomatic certificate, a Zagreb master's, a Fulbright, a Harvard fellowship and a SAIS post along the route, operating in seven languages. Underneath the résumé is a real and unusual faculty — an eye for where institutional power was about to accumulate, and the willingness to stand in its path early. She was on EU accession before it was won, on NATO accession before it was won, on public diplomacy before alliances took it seriously, and she conceived the Three Seas Initiative with Duda before Central European connectivity became a geopolitical fashion. That last is a piece of actual strategic invention, and it survived her.

The counter-case is substantial. She lost re-election with the weakest vote any sitting Croatian president has recorded. She was dismissed as foreign minister for reasons never made public. The presidency she held is largely ceremonial, which caps what any occupant can demonstrate. And the controversies over Ustaše language are not incidental: they show a professional communicator repeatedly misjudging the most sensitive vocabulary in her own country and having to retreat. Her gift is diplomatic and presentational — positioning, packaging, presence, the ability to be in the right room and be remembered in it. That is a serious professional skill. It is not originality of mind, and calling it genius without saying which kind would be flattery.

Legacy

In 2020 she was elected to the International Olympic Committee, Croatia's fourth member and its first woman on the body. The Fulbright Association gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 for her work as a leader, diplomat and public servant; Forbes had ranked her the world's 39th most powerful woman in 2017. Croatia has had a woman as head of state and will not find it remarkable next time. That was the point of her, and it holds whatever anyone thinks of the rest.

Achievements

• President of Croatia (2015–2020)
• Minister of Foreign and European Affairs (2005–2008)
• member of the International Olympic Committee (from 2020)
• Grand Order of King Tomislav
• Grand Order of Queen Jelena
• Grand Order of King Petar Krešimir IV
• Grand Order of King Dmitar Zvonimir
• Educated at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb and University of Zagreb