She studied art at the Latvian Academy of Art from 1977 to 1981 and worked as an art historian, publishing a book, Latvian Textile Art, in 1989. She joined politics in 1988, during Latvia’s independence movement, and was a deputy chairwoman and one of the founders of Latvian Popular Front, the main pro-independence political organization. Ms. Kalniete has graduated from the Department of Art History and Art Theory at the Art Academy of Latvia (1981), the Institute for International Studies at the University of Leeds (1992), The Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva (1995), and has a Master of Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia (1996).

Kalniete became Foreign Minister of Latvia in November 2002 and served in this position until in 2004 when she was appointed the first Latvian Commissioner of the European Union in charge of Agriculture and Fisheries.

In 2004, she argued that “behind the Iron Curtain the Soviet regime continued to commit genocide against the peoples of Eastern Europe and, indeed, against its own people […] the two totalitarian regimes—Nazism and Communism—were equally criminal.” She elaborated on this in 2006 when she came up with death counts for the two regimes, pointing out that the Soviet Union killed around 94.5 million people.

At the beginning of 2006, Kalniete joined the New Era Party. In October 2006, she was elected to the Latvian parliament. She was the 2007 candidate of the New Era Party for the post of Latvian president, before withdrawing in favor of Aivars Endziņš on 24 May 2007.

Between 2006 and 2007, Kalniete served as member of the Amato Group, a group of high-level European politicians unofficially working on rewriting the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe into what became known as the Treaty of Lisbon following its rejection by French and Dutch voters.

In 2008, Kalniete announced she was leaving the New Era Party. She joined the newly founded Civic Union and became the party’s leader. In the 2009 European Parliament election she was elected as a Member of the European Parliament and reelected in the 2014 European Parliament election in Latvia. She put herself forward as a potential candidate to succeed Andris Bērziņš as President of Latvia after his decision to step down in 2015.