Karin Kneissl

In August 2018, she married entrepreneur Wolfgang Meilinger, 54, at a ceremony in the small town of Gamlitz, near the border with Slovenia. Russian president Vladimir Putin attended her wedding.

In her public writings and appearances Kneissl has often sharply criticised the European Union and raised controversy with remarks on migration. In July 2016, after the Brexit referendum, she criticised European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker as "cynic of power", "rowdy" and "arrogant", who "behaves as a Brussels Caesar, who has made it his goal to break agreements, if it seems useful." A quote from her book "My Middle East" also caused controversy, as she criticised Zionism, founded by Austro-Hungarian publicist Theodor Herzl, as a "blood and soil ideology" based on German nationalism in the 19th century. On the issue of refugees, migration, and integration she was also accused of serving stereotypes. At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, Kneissl pointed out that most of them are economic migrants and that asylum seekers are "80 percent" young men between the ages of 20 and 30. In September 2015, she said on public television that one of the reasons for the revolts in the Arab world was "these many young men", "testosterone-controlled", "who no longer managed to get a wife today" because they have neither work nor their own home, and thus could not achieve "status as a man in a traditional society". She also sharply criticised German Chancellor Angela Merkel as "grossly negligent" for her selfies with refugees, and later described the EU-Turkey refugee agreement as "nonsense". Such remarks led to criticism and caused doubts concerning her self-definition as a "conservative free-thinker", but also gained praise and sympathy from populist anti-mass migration party FPÖ, to whose events she was increasingly invited. In 2016, FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache considered nominating Kneissl as presidential candidate, but eventually decided in favour of Norbert Hofer instead.

Kneissl is Vice President of the Austrian Society for Political-Military Studies STRATEG. From 2011 to 2015, she was on the board of Whistleblowing Austria. On 30 June 2012, she was guest of honor in the annual "multiculture ball" organized by the Afro-Asian Institute Graz (AAI Graz). On 10 May 2017 she was appointed to the supervisory board of the Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein.

She left the diplomatic service in the fall of 1998, and has since lived in Seibersdorf near Vienna, where she was active between 2005 and 2010 as an independent local councilor on the list of ÖVP. Kneissl has since worked as a freelance journalist for German and English-language print media. She became known to the public through her political analyses in the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, and she has authored several specialized and non-fiction books.

In 1990 she joined Austria's Foreign Office. From 1990 to 1998 she worked in the cabinet of ÖVP foreign minister Alois Mock, in the International Law Office, and was posted abroad in Paris and Madrid.

Kneissl studied law and oriental languages at the University of Vienna between 1983 and 1987. After graduating, she studied International relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Jordan in Amman. Subsequently, she spent a year as a Fulbright fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. In 1992 she graduated from the École nationale d'administration. She earned a PhD in international law with a dissertation on the Notion of borders of the belligerent parties of the Middle East.

Karin Kneissl (born 18 January 1965) is an Austrian diplomat, journalist and independent politician, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2017 and 2019. She is an expert on the Middle East and was a lecturer before assuming the government position she was offered by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.