Granić was born in Baška Voda in Dalmatia. He graduated from a gymnasium in Split and the medical faculty of the University of Zagreb to become a doctor by profession. Mate Granić served as the foreign minister of Croatia from 1993 until 2000. He was a member of the Croatian Democratic Union and a close associate of Franjo Tuđman. As foreign minister, Granić helped negotiate a peace treaty between Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia and he visited Serbia in 1996. Granić was considered to be a leader of the HDZ center-reformist wing. His objective as foreign minister was to defend Croatian policies concerning it's occupied terriotries and towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as protecting Croatia from UN sanctions. His reformist views made him an opportunistic choice for party's presidential candidate after the Tuđman's death. In January 2000, Granić entered the presidential election, but was eliminated in the first round, coming in third place with 22.5% of the vote. He was not a great campaigner nor a natural populist, which probably led to his crushing defeat. When a new cabinet took office later that month, now with the HDZ without the presidency or control of the Parliament, Granić lost his post as foreign minister. Afterwards, Granić's led a splinter faction of HDZ to form the Democratic Centre. Granić believed that HDZ will be completely overtaken by tudjmanists led by Ivić Pašalić, former Tuđman's interior politics consultant, and that's why he founded a new party. However, not all reformists followed Granić, and in 2002 they finally won a bitter inner-party struggle with the tudjmanists. Granić's former protégé Ivo Sanader became party's leader, and all that made DC politically indistinct from HDZ. As a result, the party barely survived 2003 elections, securing only one parliamentary seat, for Vesna Škare-Ožbolt who later became the Minister of Justice in Sanader's government. Granić left DC and seemingly retired from public life after the election. In 2004 he founded a consulting company called MAGRA Ltd. in Zagreb. In 2005, he became a special advisor to the presidency of the Croatian Party of Rights. In the 2007 parliamentary election he headed the HSP election list in the 3rd election unit. The list failed to attain a seat in the Parliament. In March 2020, Granić returned to the Croatian Democratic Union. Granić is married with three children. His brother Goran Granić is a prominent Croatian politician, but unlike Mate, Goran is a liberal.
