# Ana Brnabić **Ana Brnabić** (born 28 September 1975, Belgrade) was [[Aleksandar Vučić]]'s prime minister for nearly seven years and then speaker of Serbia's National Assembly. When Vučić resigned the presidency on **27 September 2026** to run for prime minister, the constitution made her **acting president**. She is the most senior official of the outgoing [[Serbian Progressive Party]] order still in office, and she must call the presidential election that follows the party's defeat in the [[2026 Serbian Parliamentary Election]]. It is due by **27 December 2026**. ## Career - **Before politics:** She studied business in the United States (Northwood University, Michigan) and the United Kingdom (MBA, University of Hull). She then worked for more than a decade with foreign investors and international development programmes, including projects funded by the [[United States Agency for International Development]] through US consulting firms, and wind-energy development. - **Minister** of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, 2016–2017, without belonging to a party. - **Prime Minister**, June 2017 to early 2024: the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the office, and the longest-serving prime minister in modern Serbia. - **Joined the SNS** in 2019 and became one of its vice-presidents in 2021. - **Speaker of the National Assembly** from 20 March 2024. ## The role Vučić held the presidency, and with it the real power, for most of her time as prime minister. Critics called her government a front for his, and she was widely seen as his loyal manager rather than an independent figure. She has said she did not want to be "Serbia's gay prime minister," and LGBT activists criticised her government for doing little on equality. She kept to the government's nationalist line on the wars of the 1990s. In a 2018 interview she denied that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide (see [[Srebrenica Genocide]]), which the international courts have found it to be. The same year she said military action over [[Kosovo]] was "one of the options on the table." In 2019 Kosovo barred her from entering after remarks its foreign minister called racist. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: the USAID career and the USAID raids > Brnabić built her pre-political career partly on projects funded by American development aid. In 2025, after the Trump administration claimed that USAID money had been used to manipulate foreign elections, the ruling party she helps lead adopted the claim. Police raided Serbian civic groups, including the election monitor [[CRTA]], over alleged misuse of USAID funds (see [[Serbian Student Movement]]). The same aid money was treated as a qualification for her and as evidence of subversion for the government's critics. ## See Also - [[Aleksandar Vučić]] · [[Serbian Progressive Party]] · [[2026 Serbian Parliamentary Election]] · [[Serbia]] · [[Serbian Student Movement]] · [[Genocide]]