Andrej Bajuk

Andrej Bajuk, also known in Spanish as Andrés Bajuk (born October 18 1943) is a Slovenian politician and economist.

Bajuk was born in German-occupied Ljubljana during World War II, in a family of intellectuals. His father was a classical philologist and his grandfather was the principal of one of the most prestigious high school in Ljubljana, the Bežigrad Gymnasium. They were family friends of the poet Edvard Kocbek who lived in the same building.

His family left the country at the beginning of May 1945, when the Communist resistance took power in Yugoslavia (and thus in Slovenia). They spent nearly three years in refugee camps in Lower and Upper Austria, and then left for Argentina, where they settled in Mendoza. Bajuk grew up, studied and started a family in Mendoza.

Bajuk received his first degree in economics in Mendoza from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. In a two-year international study programme organised by the University of Chicago he received his first Master's degree, receiving the second jointly with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Mendoza, where he taught as a professor at the university. After the military coup in 1976 he was fired and soon left for Washington, D.C., working for the World Bank for a year. He then switched to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where he stayed for a number of years. He held a range of positions at the IDB, from economist in charge of analysing social projects to adviser to the executive vice-president. For his last six years in Washington he was in charge of the office of the Presidency of the bank and a member of the board of executive directors of the bank. From September 1994 he was IDB representative for Europe in Paris.

Since the second half of 1999 Bajuk has spent a considerable amount of time in Slovenia and, following the coalition agreement between the Slovenian Christian Democrats (SKD) and the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia (SDS), assumed leadership of the expert council developing the coalition's alternative government programme. At the unification congress of the SKD and Slovene People's Party (SLS) he was elected deputy president of the unified party.

After the fall of Janez Drnovšek's centre-left government, Andrej Bajuk became the Prime Minister on 3 May 2000, and led the government until 16 November 2000. In July 2000, the newly merged SLS+SKD - Slovenian People's Party - contrary to previously agreed policy and government stance - voted in favour of an electoral system based on proportional representation. This led Prime Minister Bajuk to leave the Slovene People's Party. In August 2000, he and his supporters founded a new political party called New Slovenia ("Nova Slovenija", N.Si).

In the elections of 2000, he was elected to the National Assembly, but Drnovsek returned to power as prime minister. Bajuk’s party stayed in opposition and formed a shadow cabinet jointly with Janez Janša's Social Democratic Party of Slovenia.

In the national elections in 2004 he was again elected to the Slovenian parliament. He did not stay an MP for long, as he soon took on the responsibilities as a finance minister in the newly elected government, led by Janez Janša. For his achievements in office, he was in 2005 declared as the "finance minister of the year in Europe" by the Financial Times Business magazine The Banker.

He is fluent in Slovene, Spanish, English and French.

References

* [http://www.mladina.si/tednik/200407/clanek/sve-kdo_je_kdaj--ursa_matos/ Biography in the magazine Mladina] sl icon