Eleni Kounalakis (née Tsakopoulos) is the 50th Lieutenant Governor of California and the first woman to hold the position. She was elected on November 6, 2018 and was sworn into office in 2019. She is currently seeking re-election for next year and is on the ballot in the primary next month.
Prior to her current position, Kounalakis served as President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the Republic of Hungary from 2010 to 2013. She was the first Greek-American woman, and at the age of 43 one of America’s youngest, to serve as U.S. Ambassador. Madam Ambassador, Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties and Democracy in Budapest, her highly acclaimed memoir, details the start of Hungary’s democratic backsliding and discusses the work of an ambassador.
Kounalakis was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and then attended the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where she earned a Master of Business Administration.
Before accepting President Barack Obama's nomination to an ambassadorship, Kounalakis spent 18 years in the housing industry, working her way up from Project Manager to President of AKT Development Corporation, her father’s company and one of California’s largest and most respected housing development firms.
She began interfaith community work while working in housing development, creating faith forums for the World Council of Religions for Peace (WCRP).
"An interfaith forum is an incredibly powerful venue for understanding how people think, a close-up opportunity to talk to people who believe completely different things from one another and have more than a bilateral conversation,” Kounalakis said in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
She was awarded the medal of St. Paul, the Greek Orthodox Church of America’s highest honor, in recognition of her work with the WCRP.
Kounalakis has served four times as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and as an at-large member of the California State Central Committee. She was also a member of the California First Five Commission and the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Autism. After she announced her candidacy for Lieutenant Governor, she visited all 58 counties in California. Her grassroots campaign, which engaged hundreds of volunteers to text over 1 million voters before Election Day, earned her the recognition of Time magazine.