Atifete Jahjaga

She was President of Kosovo from 2011 to 2016, the country's first woman president and its first independent one, and runs the Jahjaga Foundation. She is named among the possible contenders for the 2026 presidential election.

Career

Jahjaga took a law degree at the University of Pristina in 2000 and later studied police management and criminal law at the University of Leicester (2006-07), crime science at the University of Virginia (2007) and trained at the FBI National Academy. After the Kosovo War she joined the Kosovo Police, rising through the ranks to major general and deputy director, and was acting director general in 2010. The Assembly elected her President of Kosovo on 7 April 2011, in the first round with 80 of 100 votes, as the first woman and first non-partisan president and the youngest to hold the post. Her term ended on 7 April 2016. In March 2018 she founded the Jahjaga Foundation, which works on democratic development and social inclusion in Kosovo and the Balkans.

Positions

Wikipedia lists the priorities of her presidency as European integration, rule-of-law reform, countering extremism, women's empowerment, reconciliation and attracting foreign investment. She sat as an independent and belongs to no party.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · Wikipedia

Photo: Granittemaj, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)