2026-09-27 15:37:22Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Melania and Donald Trump

US First Lady Melania Trump recalled her upbringing in socialist Yugoslavia, saying that despite living under the communist system, she had a "very beautiful childhood."

"I grew up under communism and I didn't lack for anything. I think I had a very beautiful childhood," Melania Trump said in an interview with Fox Business.

Speaking about whether the experience of growing up in what was then Yugoslavia gave her a different perspective on freedom, she admitted that life was different than in the United States.

“There are some things you have to be aware of. You have to be careful what you do,” she said. She added that the system back then “wasn’t as free as it is here in the United States today,” but stressed that she doesn’t remember her childhood negatively.

Melania Trump was born in 1970 as Melanija Knavs in Novi Mesto, in what was then the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, one of the six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was ruled by Josip Broz Tito for decades, and its political system differed from the Soviet model. After the conflict with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia distanced itself from the Soviet Union and developed its own form of socialism, including a system of workers' self-management.

Despite greater independence from Moscow, political power remained concentrated in the hands of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. At the same time, Slovenia was the most developed Yugoslav republic.

After Tito's death in 1980, political and economic tensions intensified. Slovenia held its first multi-party elections in 1990 and declared independence on June 25, 1991. Melania Trump was 21 at the time. She moved to the United States in the 1990s, where she built a career as a model and became a U.S. citizen in 2006.

Newsweek recalls that her statements come at a time when Donald Trump often uses the term communism in political attacks on the Democratic Party and part of the American left. Trump said in July that “communism is a loser and always will be,” while at the Republican convention in early September he claimed that democratic socialists actually “call themselves Democrats, but they are really communists.”


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