Slovenian Election Moves Country to Right

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 1992, Slovenia emerged as an independent country from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia.

Fortunately for the Slovenes, this was accomplished quickly and relatively peacefully. The country did not go through the protracted and brutal wars that enveloped the rest of the former state, and it has peaceful relations with all its neighbours.

The Slovenes were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World Wart. When Yugoslavia was established after the First World War, the Slovenes, a southern Slav people, were incorporated into the new state.

Following the conquest of Yugoslavia by the Germans and Italians in 1941, the southern part of Slovenia, including Ljubljana, was annexed to Italy, while the Nazis took over the northern and eastern parts of the country.

In 1945, Yugoslavia was liberated by the partisan resistance and soon became a Communist federation, with Slovenia one of its constituent republics.

As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the 1980s, Slovenes began to demand democratization and independence. The Slovenian declaration of independence on June 25, 1991 led to a brief conflict, known as the Ten-Day War, with the Yugoslav army, in effect establishing Slovenia as an independent polity.

So Slovenia's independence from Yugoslavia was almost bloodless. The country also found the transition from a state economy to the free market easier than most other former Yugoslav republics.

Since independence, the largely ethnically homogenous country of some two million people – a little less than 300,000 in the capital, Ljubljana -- has remained a vibrant democracy. 

Slovenes have looked towards Italy rather than to fellow Slavs in Croatia or Serbia, and are more west European than Balkan in orientation. Since 2004, the country belongs to both NATO and the European Union.

Long regarded as one of the best-performing new EU members, Slovenia was dragged into a deep recession by the European financial crisis in 2012, leading to political turbulence.

A coalition government headed by Prime Minister Miro Cerar of the Modern Centre Party (SMC), which he founded in 2014, was formed that year. The party won 34.6 per cent of the vote in the 2014 parliamentary election, good for 36 of the 90 seats in parliament.

However, in March Cerar resigned his position, after facing public-sector strikes, resistance to reform by his ruling partners, and a ruling by the Supreme Court that annulled a referendum he had won backing a new rail link from Koper, an Adriatic port, to Divaca, on the Italian border.  

Cerar had insisted the rail line would be of strategic importance for the development of Slovenia. “This was the straw that broke the camel's back,” Cerar said in his resignation note to parliament.

On June 3, new parliamentary elections saw the opposition centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), led by Janez Jansa, a former prime minister, win almost 25 per cent of the vote, good for 25 of the 90 seats in parliament. 

It is opposed to immigration and is closely allied to Victor Orban’s Hungary. Jansa vowed to secure the border against illegal migration and opposes the EU’s imposition of migrant quotas on member states.

A hike in the number of people trying to cross into Slovenia had pushed migration up the electoral agenda. Police dealt with 1,226 illegal border crossings in the first four months of 2018, compared with 322 over the same period last year. 

The anti-establishment List of Marjan Sarec (LMS) party of comedian-turned-politician Marjan Sarec got 12.6 per cent, followed by the centre-left Social Democrats (SD) with almost 10 per cent, while Cerar’s SMC managed just 9.7 per cent. They will receive 13, 10 and 10 seats, respectively.

As Jansa’s party didn’t secure enough of the vote to rule on his own, postelection negotiations to form a new government are necessary. The SDS will need to link up with at least two other parties to gain a majority – not an easy task.