Dimitrij Rupel

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Dimitrij Rupel

Minister for Foreign Affairs

Born	April 7, 1946 (1946-04-07) (age 62) Ljubljana, Slovenia
Political party	Slovenian Democratic Party

Dimitrij Rupel (born April 7, 1946) is a Slovenian politician and the current foreign minister of that country.

Rupel was born in Ljubljana, in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, into a bourgeois family of former anti-fascist political emigrants from the Julian March (his grandfather was the last Slovenian mayor of Duino in Austria-Hungary). He studied at the University of Ljubljana (where he got his bachelor's degree in comparative literature and sociology), the University of Essex, and the Brandeis University (where he got a Ph.D. in sociology in 1976). During this time, he has published literary works, journalistic and critical articles, and has worked as a translator and editor.

From 1977 to 1978, he taught at Queen's University in Canada, then in 1985 at the New School for Social Research of New York and at Cleveland State University in 1989.

Together with other Slovenian intellectuals in the 1980s, initiated and edited the alternative and dissident journal Nova Revija, which later the platform for democratic reform in Slovenia.

In 1989, Rupel was one of the founders of the Slovenian Democratic Union (Slovenska demokratična zveza, SDZ), one of the first democratic parties that challenged the Communist regime.

After the victory of the DEMOS coalition in the first democratic elections in Slovenia in 1990, Rupel was appointed as the first foreign minister of Slovenia in the cabinet of Lojze Peterle. He served from 1990 until 1993, during the country's secession from Yugoslavia.

In 1991, the Slovenian Democratic Union splitted and Rupel led its left-wing fraction, formed among others by Jelko Kacin, Igor Bavčar, and France Bučar, into the formation of a new party, called the Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka). The same year, he was elected its president. In the elections of 1992, the new party suffered a defeat, but Rupel managed to be elected representative in the National Assembly of Slovenia. In 1994, most of Rupel's party merged into the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia led by Janez Drnovšek. In 1994, he ran successfully for mayor of Ljubljana and took office in 1995. He remained on this position until 1997 when he was appointed ambassador to the United States.

Rupel returned to the post of the foreign minister of Slovenia in 2000 in the third cabinet of Janez Drnovšek. He remained at this position until July 2004, when Prime Minister Anton Rop replaced him with Ivo Vajgl. He returned to his seat in Parliament, left the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia and joined the oppositional Slovenian Democratic Party. In October 2004, this party won the election and Rupel became foreign minister in Janez Janša's government when it was approved by Parliament on 3 December 2004.

Due to his changing alliegences to different parties, he has been frequently criticised as a being interested more in power than in principle.

During 2005 he was the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE.

Dr. Rupel is a member of PEN, AAASS, the Slovenian Writer's Association and the Association of Sociologists. Besides Slovene, he speaks English, German, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian to varying degrees of competence.

He is the uncle of the Slovenian pop-singer Anja Rupel.