From local self-government to second term in office: Who is the old-new candidate for Serbia's PM?

Photo: Tanjug/Sava Radovanovic

The old-new prime minister-designate, Ana Brnabic has been at the helm of the government since June 29, 2017, when she was elected prime minister for the first time, becoming the first woman in Serbia to be entrusted with that post.

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She came to the position of prime minister from the post of minister of state administration and local self-government, which she headed from August 2016. She moved to 11 Nemanjina Street, the seat of the Serbian government, as a non-partisan figure, but at the end of 2019 officially joined the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

Brnabic was born in 1975 in Belgrade. After completing her studies in the US and in the UK, where she obtained a master's degree from Hull University, and more than ten years of work with international organizations and foreign investors, at the end of 2001 she returned to Serbia where she began working as a public relations officer in the Serbian Agricultural Development Program, which were at the time funded by the EU.

She stayed there for only two months, after which she joined USAID where she works on various projects this organization has in Serbia. Brnabic was deputy director of the competitiveness development project of Serbia, an expert on the local self-government reform program in Serbia and a senior coordinator of the municipal economic development program.

She became a member and then president of the management board of NALED, which received the status of the largest independent private-public organization that advocates for improved economic environment in Serbia and which in close cooperation with the government of the Republic of Serbia contributed to strengthening Serbia's competitiveness internationally and on World Bank's "Doing Business" lists.

Photo: Tanjug/Tara Radovanovic

In 2011, she joined Continental Wind Serbia, a US company developing wind farms, where she worked on an investment worth 300 million euros in a wind farm in the municipality of Kovin, and two years later became the director of the company.

Brnabic participated in the founding and was the first executive director, as well as a member of the board of directors of the non-profit foundation Pexim, which provides scholarships to talented students from Serbia and Macedonia returning to their countries to help economic and social development after master's studies in Cambridge.

She is the winner of the "Business Lady of the Year" award in the "Corporate Social Responsibility" category for 2013. Brnabic is also the winner of the "Rainbow" award of the Gay Straight Alliance for 2016-2017.

She came to the helm of the government of Serbia from the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government

In August 2016, she was elected minister of State Administration and Local Self-Government in the government of Serbia, and she stayed in that office until she was elected as prime minister.

Brnabic worked on a faster systemic introduction of e-government in Serbia, with the aim of improving efficiency of state administration and local self-government, directly raising the quality of life of Serbian citizens, building a more modern and transparent administration and fight against corruption.

The two most significant projects she has implemented in this segment during her tenure are the e-Beba project ("Baby, welcome to the world") and e-ZUP (full implementation of the Law on General Administrative Procedure).

As part of the fight against the gray economy, she was in charge of implementing the prize game "Take the receipt and win" in which more than 40 percent of Serbian citizens took part, and which resulted in significantly increased awareness of the importance of the fight against the gray economy.

(Telegraf.rs)