Of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia has always enjoyed the greatest degree of separation and distinction. This, in part, was because it was the most advanced economically — at the end of the Tito era, with only 8 per cent of the population, it was responsible for 30 per cent of Yugoslav’s foreign currency earnings — but also because its language was distinct from Serbian/Croatian. And if Slovenia itself were different within a Yugoslav context, its former President, Janez Drnovsek, stood out as different from all who have preceded him in that office. Even when on the threshold of becoming Yugoslavia’s head of state, he was described by those who knew him as a man “who lacked all the defining features of a politician”. Yet he became a politician of considerable ability who, for nearly two decades, was to be at the centre of his nation’s affairs.

Janez Drnovsek was born in 1950 in Celje, the small town where 60 years previously Slovenian nationalists had cut their teeth on the hard rock of Habsburg bureaucracy by fighting for classes in Slovene rather than German in the local grammar school. Drnovsek graduated in 1973 from the faculty of economics in the University of Ljubljana; eight years later he gained a master’s degree and in 1986 successfully defended his doctoral thesis in the University of Maribor. After graduation he joined a construction company and began working for a bank near his home in the Zasavje region of central Slovenia. He specialised in credit, monetary policy and international financial relations, his experience and acumen leading to his appointment, for one year, as economic adviser at the Yugoslav Embassy in Cairo.

It was, however, in politics that Drnovsek was to rise to prominence. By the second half of the 1980s, Slovenia, following its separatist traditions, was at the head of the movement for reform and further decentralisation in Yugoslavia. After Tito’s death in 1980 Yugoslavia was led by an eight-member presidency, the chairmanship rotating each year between the country’s six republics and two autonomous regions. It was normal practice for representatives to the central presidency to be nominated by the local party apparatus in the respective republics and regions. In April 1989 Slovenia broke ranks, defied the established practice and decided that their representative should be elected by the entire population of the republic. The local party apparat duly chose its candidate. He was opposed by the little-known Drnovsek. It was the first fully free election in Yugoslavia since the end of the Second World War and Drnovsek won it.

Within months of his victory Drnovsek was at the centre of the gathering storm that was to tear Yugoslavia apart. In May 1989 he became for a year chairman of the presidency. His instincts were for compromise and the preservation of the Yugoslav federation, albeit in an altered and more decentralised form. His efforts to prevent the war that he knew to be the alternative to that compromise were skilful and courageous, and he played a particularly important role in mediating between the politicians and the military. But when the war he had so long feared became inevitable Drnovsek returned to his home republic. With the federation collapsing he had no other political base, but his return to Ljubljana was not a matter of opportunism. In the words of one foreign ambassador who witnessed at close hand the climatic events of 1989-91, Drnovsek was one of the few local politicians “who came through the Yugoslav crisis with honour”.

Drnovsek’s effort to preserve Yugoslavia had not been popular with radical nationalists at home, nor did the fact that throughout his adult life he been a member of the League of Communists aid his political credibility. In April 1990 the national League of Communists reformed itself to contest Slovenia’s first free parliamentary elections and Drnovsek secured election to the assembly. He and his colleagues in the reformed communist party were the largest group in the new assembly but they could not construct a viable coalition and the reins of government were picked up by Demos, an alliance of anti-communist factions. Then the communist monolith split and Drnovsek became leader of the new Liberal Democratic Party. By early 1992 the ruling coalition had weakened seriously; that April it lost a parliamentary vote of confidence. On May 14 a new Government was formed with Drnovsek as Prime Minister. With the exception of a few months in 2000, he was to remain in that office for a decade, and in three successive parliamentary elections his party received more seats than any other.

During his premiership he had to ride out a number of storms. The most furious in 1998 involved the leader of the opposition demanding Drnovsek’s resignation after allegations that the Slovene and Israeli intelligence agencies had colluded in 1995, with Drnovsek’s connivance, over arms purchases. But Drnovsek’s communists also achieved notable successes. An agreement was reached by which property confiscated by the communists was returned to the Roman Catholic Church, a powerful body in intensely Catholic Slovenia. At the same time, Slovenia consolidated its economic position and made important moves towards closer integration with Western international organisations. In March 1995 the European Union gave the go-ahead for officials to begin negotiations with Slovenia on an association agreement, which was duly signed the following year. In June 1999, when he visited Ljubljana, President Clinton declared that “the whole world admires Slovenia’s success in building freedom and prosperity”. He also said the country was “an excellent candidate for Nato”. Slovenia was invited to join the EU in October 2002; it became a member of Nato in March 2004 and of the EU in May of the same year.

Although the ground for membership of both the EU and Nato had been prepared during Drnovsek’s term as Prime Minister, by the time accession to those organisations took place he had relinquished the premiership and assumed the presidency. He decided to run for the latter post in November 2002 and won in the second round of the presidential elections. He remained head of state until 2007.

His decision to quit the more demanding post of premier for that of President was due partly to mounting criticism from both within and without the ruling coalition, but the main reason was his declining health. In 1999 Drnovsek had had a cancerous kidney removed and further malignant tumours were discovered in 2001.

This produced an extraordinary change in Drnovsek’s lifestyle. He resorted to a degree of mysticism and asceticism equalled among public figures only by the late Liudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the former Bulgarian communist leader. To the dismay of his doctors, Drnovsek rejected established medicine and although he became drawn and thin, he retained a remarkable degree of energy and vitality. “I feel healthy, therefore I am healthy,” he declared. Under his new regimen for much of the time, he rejected the presidential palace in Ljubljana and chose to live with his dog in the remote village of Zaplana, eating only organic fruit and vegetables, baking his own bread and wearing hippy clothes. He made courageous and at times unorthodox statements criticising the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, launching a number of personal campaigns, including one for peace in Darfur, and taking up the cause of a Roma family evicted from its home. And he warned Slovenes, and all other nations, that they were living on the edge of the apocalypse. In 2006 he founded and became the first president of the Movement for Justice and Development, which denied it was a political party, declaring that it merely wished “to raise human consciousness and make the world a better place”. While his increasing eccentricity earned him the affection of many of his fellow-countrymen, it embarrassed and frequently angered the ruling politicians. In retaliation, the Government cut the presidential budget.

Drnovsek was a prolific writer, publishing a number of books that derived from his changed lifestyle. These included Thoughts on Life and Consciousness, which deals with the individual’s search for inner equilibrium, ideas that he developed in The Essence of the World, and in Dialogues, which addressed the questions of spirituality, the meaning of life and the destiny of the human race. But there were other works too, dealing with much more mundane issues. He wrote on his specialised subject, international finance, but gained a much wider readership with Escape from Hell in which he described his part in the crisis that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia.

In 1992 Drnovsek was given Slovenia’s highest national award, the Golden Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia. He was also awarded Le prix de la Méditerranée by the Crans Montana Forum, and the Public Leadership Award by the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He was honoured by the American Institute of Political and Economic Systems in Prague, and also received the Diálogo Europeo award from Madrid, and the Ramón Trias Fargas award in Barcelona. He was given honorary degrees by Boston University in 1994 and the Illinois Wesleyan University five years later, and in 2004 he was made a Protector and Honorary Senator of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg.

In the latter stages of his life Drnovsek was known more for the eccentricity of his lifestyle than for his solid achievements as Prime Minister and President. A man of moderation, courage, skill and, at least in his early years, sound common sense, Drnovsek was among those primarily responsible for moving Slovenia from the collapsing world of communism to the inner sanctum of the EU.

He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Dr Janez Drnovsek, President and former Prime Minister of Slovenia, was born on May 17, 1950. He died on February 23, 2008, aged 57