On the evening of Sunday 24 April the spotlight of average Europeans will focus on Paris, where the outcome of the match between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will significantly affect the future of the European Union. But also from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, important news will arrive: in the parliamentary elections the reconfirmation of Prime Minister Janez Janša is at stake, who recently had more than one problem with the community institutions and seems determined to proceed on the sovereign path already traveled by Poland and Hungary.
According to the latest polls, seven parties are traveling above the 4% threshold, ready to compete for 90 seats (including one reserved for the Italian minority) in the National Assembly, the lower house of the Ljubljana Parliament.
Those favored to excel are the Slovenian Democratic Party of the current Prime Minister Janez Janša and Gibanje Svoboda, the Freedom Movement born in May 2021, led by former Energy Minister Robert Golob, and already frontrunner of the opposition. The appointment of April 24 will be the first and most important round of a year-long challenge, which includes presidential and local elections in the autumn.
Janša has promised to cut Russian gas imports and has been very active in supporting Ukraine, making the first voyage together with his counterparts in the Czech Republic and Poland. leader Europeans in Kiev during the war. Called a “political chameleon” by analystshas gone from youth communism to the rhetorical arsenal of the far right with Eurosceptic slogans and frequent expressions of esteem for Viktor Orbán.
Golob’s party, on the other hand, is a new political force, born from the ashes of the Slovenian Green Party: its program focuses on the fight against climate change, to which are added the proposals to reform the health and pension systems. It seems capable of attracting the preferences of both right and left voters. For this reason, in the forecasts, Gibanje Svoboda ousted the Social Democrats of MEP Tanja Fajon as Janša’s main rival.
Its leader accuses the Prime Minister of using the conflict for internal propaganda, as well as undermining democratic standards in the country and its independent bodies. “Press freedom and respect for the rule of law have worsened in the last two years, so much so that Slovenia has lost six places in the Corruption Perceptions Index,” Gibanje Svoboda’s spokesperson told Linkiesta. “Given that the party in power is copying the way of managing the media from Hungary, a similar result awaits us.”
Neither, however, will reach an absolute majority and whoever is the formal winner of the round will have to seek the support of other political formations to govern.
Which makes the outcome of the elections uncertain even after the vote count: Janša’s party, for example, had come first in the last parliamentary round, in 2018, but the comedian Marjan Sarec, who with his liberal-inspired personal list was placed in second place and he was then able to aggregate the smaller parties behind him. A political miscalculation by Sarec, who in 2020 was seeking new elections convinced of obtaining a majority, paved the way for Janša, allowing him to form a new governing coalition.
The anti-European drift of Slovenia
Since then, the Slovenian government has run into a series of disputes with the institutions of the European Union, between dialectical incidents and moments of real political confrontation.
The most problematic issue concerns the situation of the press in the country, after the government cut funding to the national news agency Sta and according to activists tends to unduly favor the media that are congenial to it. The country lost four places in 2021 in World Press Freedom Index by Rsfwhich highlights how the intimidating tendency on the part of information politics has been accentuated since the beginning of Janša’s mandate.
Another moment of tension was the appointment of Slovenian delegated prosecutors to the European Public Prosecutor Office (Eppo). The community office that investigates possible fraud and embezzlement of European funds has been active since 1 June 2021: 22 EU countries participate (all except Hungary, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and Poland), each of which designates a European prosecutor, who sits in Luxembourg in the central college, and at least two delegated prosecutors operating on the national territory.
Slovenia waited a long time before proceeding with the appointment, which only took place last November, of Frank Eler and Matej Oštir. The initial refusal of the government to present the two delegates, apparently at the personal indication of Janša, led to the resignation of the Minister of Justice Lilijana Kozlovič and aroused suspicions about the use of EU funds in the country.
A concern manifested also by the president of the Eppo, the Romanian magistrate Laura Codruța Kövesi for a bill that would have cut investigation times for various types of crimes. An amnesty de facto for many cases of fraud against European funds in Slovenia, according to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The substantive terms of the confrontation are accompanied by a series of daring communications that earned the Slovenian Prime Minister the nickname of «Marshal Twito», Given his passion for social network.
Six congratulations to Donald Trump for an election that never took place, they can be dismissed as a reckless stance, more serious in form and substance were the tweet who define current and past MEPs (including one deceased) “puppets of Soros” or the one with whom he anticipated the visit of President Ursula von der Leyen to Kiev, before the Commission itself announced the mission. Many in Brussels are hoping for the next one post is not the celebration of an electoral triumph.
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