site.btaSlovenia Poised for Crucial Parliamentary Elections

On Sunday, April 24, the people of Slovenia will decide whether to give their current centre-right Prime Minister Janez Jansa a chance to form another cabinet or whether to place their trust in the green centre-left policies of the successful business manager Robert Golob.

The forthcoming parliamentary elections in Slovenia, described by some analysts as historic, will be hotly contested, to judge from public opinion polls. About 1.7 million voters are entitled to choose from among 1,400-plus candidates on 20 tickets contending for the 90 seats in the National Assembly, two of which are reserved for the Italian and Hungarian minorities.

Recent polls show that seven parties will make it into the National Assembly. It is hard to predict whether Prime Minister Jansa's centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) will win the elections or whether it will be ousted by Golob's new green centre-left Freedom Movement. Pollsters give SDS between 25.5% and 29.4% of the vote, and the Freedom Movement between 26.3% and 28.6%.

Voter turnout at the previous parliamentary elections was 52%, and now it is expected to reach 60%, with some analysts predicting an even higher percentage.

Joze Biscak, Editor-in-Chief of Slovenia's right-wing magazine Demokracija, told BTA he expects the winner in the elections to prevail by a small margin over the second-placed party. Biscak believes that the incumbent SDS is the front-runner, considering that "the centre-right government has achieved much economic and political success which the people would like to see sustained". He cited as examples "the excellent Slovenian presidency of the EU Council" in the second half of last year, "the record-low unemployment", and the fact that The Economist named Slovenia among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which were coping best with the COVID pandemic from an economic perspective.

The Slovenian economy grew by 8.1% in 2021, unemployment stood at 4.7%, and inflation was 1.9%, according to International Monetary Fund data. The average net monthly wage in the country is 1,360 euro.

However, the opposition has said during the election campaign that quite a few people live below the poverty line and society is beset by inequality.

Veso Stojanov, a journalist with the Slovenian newspaper Delo, told BTA that the forthcoming elections are very important, perhaps even historic, mainly because of Prime Minister Janez Jansa, who, "amid the fight against the COVID outbreak over the last two years, has tried to turn Slovenian society into a non-liberal regime of the type we see in Hungary".

The latest Freedom in the World report of the Washington-based organization Freedom House, published on the eve of the Slovenian elections, says that democratic standards in Slovenia in 2021 declined most considerably compared to other countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This is attributed to Jansa's government which "exerted strong political and financial pressure on civil society organizations, the public media, the judicial system and the European Public Prosecutor's Office". Despite the decline, Slovenia is still among the best performing countries in the region, the report says.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is, and will be, one of the greatest challenges confronting the powerholders in Slovenia. Under Jansa's leadership, Ljubljana took a pro-Ukrainian stance in unison with the EU position. According to Veso Stojanov, the Delo journalist, the Ukrainian crisis is working to the Slovenian Prime Minister's advantage, whose public approval rating had been going down.

Stojanov noted: "Jansa has become very active in Europe. He travelled to Kyiv, he was the most vocal supporter of Ukraine as he tried to pose as a great and responsible leader. He did it for the sole purpose of letting voters at home forget about his disastrous mistakes and weak leadership over the last two years."

Analysts have suggested that the only political player who has the charisma to stand (and possibly win) against the linchpin of Slovenia's centre-right political space is Robert Golob. He is publicly known mainly as former board chairman of energy trading company GEN-I. After failing to get reappointed at the helm of the state-owned company, Golob returned to politics and headed the non-parliamentary Green Actions Party (Z.DEJ), later renamed Freedom Movement.

The winner of the Slovenian parliamentary elections this coming Sunday is hard to predict, but it is clear that the next government will have to be a coalition one. With no party set to win a full majority, the contestant who prevails in the race will need partners with whom to govern the country.