Robert Golob

Robert Golob (born 23 January 1967) is a Slovenian businessman and politician, serving as Prime Minister of Slovenia and leader of the Freedom Movement since 2022. Early life and education Golob obtained his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Ljubljana in 1994. After his studies, he was a post-doctoral Fulbright scholar in the United States at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Business career In 2004, Golob co-founded an energy trading company GEN-I, which is state-controlled, and where he remained chairman until 2021. Political career Between May 1999 and June 2000, Golob was the State Secretary at the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the government led by prime minister Janez Drnovšek of the LDS party. In 2002, he was elected to the City Council of Nova Gorica, a position he held until 2022. In 2011, Golob joined the Positive Slovenia party, founded by the mayor of Ljubljana Zoran Janković. In 2013–14, with the rising tensions within the party between its founder and chairman Zoran Janković and Prime Minister Alenka Bratušek, Golob played a mediating role between the two factions. With the final break within the party in April 2014, he joined the breakaway Party of Alenka Bratušek (SAB), becoming one of its vice-presidents. After the poor performance of SAB in the subsequent 2014 election, winning only four seats, he moved away from politics on the national level, remaining active only at the local level in the municipality of Nova Gorica; he chaired the neighborhood assembly of Kromberk-Loke between 2010 and 2014, remaining one of its members until 2022.