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.

When his mandate as chairman of GEN-I ended in 2021, and after not receiving another one, Golob decided to take an active role in politics again.

Prime Minister (2022–present)
In January 2022, Golob took over the small extraparliamentary Green Actions Party and renamed it to Freedom Movement. On 24 April 2022, in the 2022 Slovenian parliamentary election, the Freedom Movement won 41 seats in the 90-seat National Assembly.

The Social Democrats, another centre-left party, announced that they would join a government led by Golob, in addition to The Left, giving him a majority in the legislature. On 25 May 2022, Golob was appointed Prime Minister of Slovenia by the National Assembly.

Golob criticized Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip during the Israel–Hamas war. In May 2024, he announced that his government would recognize a Palestinian state.

Personal life
Golob was married to Jana Nemec Golob for over thirty years. They have three children. Since autumn 2022 he has been living with a former model Tina Gaber in Ljubljana.