Marta Kos

Former olympian Marta Kos is a diplomat and business woman who turned to politics and consultancy. In the late 90s Kos served as a Director of the Slovenian Government Information Office (source), from where she transitioned into Chamber of Commerce and Industry, of which she was Vice President (LinkedIn). Since 2003, for ten years she worked as a business trainer at Gustav Kaeser Training International. She then moved to diplomacy, becoming the Ambassador of Slovenia to Germany and Latvia and then to Switzerland and Lichtestein. She funded her own coaching company in 2021, based in Switzerland (LinkedIn). 

Since 2023, she is Senior Adviser at Kreab. Kreab is one of the biggest big business lobby consultancies, and its corporate clients include Amazon, Google, BP and lots of chemicals producers and banks. Despite working there, Kos is not registered on the transparency register, leaving us to wonder what clients she has advised.

Lastly, Kos is married to Henri Getaz, secretary general of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). (Source)

Party positions/ National government record

Slovenia’s coalition government was formed in autumn 2022 of the majority Freedom Movement, together with the Social Democrats and the left-wing party Levica; it is led by the Freedom Movement’s chair, Robert Golob, in the role of PM (Euronews). Golob was formerly the boss (and founder) of electricity company (and gas supplier) GEN-I (source). The Freedom Movement itself was only formed in January 2022 (source), the successor of the Green Actions Party (source), but became the biggest party in the same year (beating the right-wing populist Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) of former PM Janez Jansa) (Euronews).  

The Freedom Movement is variously described as “liberal” (Euronews) and “left-leaning” (Politico), the coalition government as “centre-left” with priorities “to improve the health and welfare systems, depoliticize the police, focus on green energy and increase media freedoms” (Reuters). The coalition government’s Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon (former S&D MEP) expressed desire for Slovenia to get closer to "core EU countries" such as Germany, France and Italy than the Visegrad Group countries Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, that were preferred by the former PM Jansa (Reuters).