By: Peter Jančič
The enthusiasm of part of the public, the sense that they had won the election together with Robert Golob, which we witnessed in the first days after the election, has faded.
Now even Golob‑aligned media are already telling us that Janša is forming the government. None of this is true. The parties of the governing coalition lost the election. Instead of 53 votes, they now have only 40 in the National Assembly. But the centre‑right parties also did not win a clear majority that would allow Janez Janša to form an effective government. For comparison, to show how poor the result of Freedom, SD and Levica is: even Marjan Šarec’s minority government had 43 votes in parliament. And there were nine backup MPs from Levica, which was not formally in the coalition but had a cooperation agreement for governing. Creative.
When the euphoria over the “magnificent victory”, in which they lost their majority, calmed down a bit, Golob told his supporters and all those he had installed at the top of state‑owned companies, the police, the media and other institutions through purges that he would form a government because the voters had decided so. Which they had not.
Voters gave Golob’s party 29 seats and SDS 28. Šarec, who is now part of Freedom, formed a government when LMŠ had only 13 MPs and SDS had 25. That a relative majority guarantees nothing is also shown by the example of Golob’s great role model Zoran Janković, who in 2012 failed to form a government with 28 MPs, when SDS had 26. What matters is who secures a majority in parliament. And if that majority is cobbled together too forcefully, it ends in disaster. Just as Borut Pahor’s government collapsed in 2011 when Gregor Golobič left it. Or Marjan Šarec’s government, with its magnificent throwing‑in‑the‑towel just as the Covid epidemic began. Or Janša’s second government before that, after Virant’s MPs defected to the left, when Goran Klemenčič abused his position as head of the anti‑corruption commission to bring down the government with accusations to which he did not even allow Janša to respond, although by the law he himself had drafted, he should have. There was a rush to rescue left‑wing tycoons in the bankrupt Probank and Factor Bank. Alenka Bratušek later took care of that with half a billion from the state budget. What followed was the sell‑off of state‑owned companies and banks to foreigners, leaving the state with nothing but Robert Golob’s energy sector.
In this campaign, the situation shifted somewhat. Among the important players for the right, Nina Zidar Klemenčič emerged. During Janša’s second government she was still the wife of politician Klemenčič, who had previously been placed at the top of the anti‑corruption commission from the office of Interior Minister Katarina Kresal, so that he would eventually bring down the right‑wing government. Zidar Klemenčič is even being sued by Janković because she explained to “foreign investors” how simple things are with Janković: you give ten percent and everything is taken care of.
The surprise of the election and the period after it is how directly SOVA, the police, and the prosecution became involved in events on Golob’s behalf. SOVA had often played a role in campaigns in the past, but back then it was hidden. Now, however, the information about percentages for Janković and the descriptions of how the media and informants are paid affected them so much that they announced this was a threat to national security, helping Golob by accusing Janša of high treason because he met with Israeli citizens suspected of being behind the revelations of corruption in our country. The reason for SOVA’s help was of course not national security. It is simple: if Golob falls, Joško Kadivnik also loses his position at the top of SOVA. A similar reason lies behind the propagandistic cheerleading we see in the media where Golob carried out purges, at RTV SLO or Siol.net. We are like third‑world countries, where the opposition is wiretapped and persecuted, and the state is abused in every possible way. This was described this week by Zoran Stevanović, whom Golob desperately needs so he does not lose power.
And he needs Anže Logar as well.
How bizarre the spin operations were, also with SOVA’s help, against SDS (and not against Stevanović) before and after the election becomes clear when we look at how they presented Giora Eiland, the former Israeli national security adviser and a general in their army (which is a far more serious institution than ours), whom Janša said he had met several times but did not name, as an agent and representative of Black Cube. This was similar to claiming that Milan Kučan is a SOVA agent because the secret police of the communist regime once worked for him. Or that he is the chief representative of the companies whose directors were united in his Forum 21, that he is therefore the head of Kolektor and the newspaper company Delo, because an important member of Forum 21 was Stojan Petrič. The retired former general Eiland has his own company; at Black Cube he is an adviser on one of their advisory boards. It is not the only company where he performs an advisory role. But representatives of Black Cube did indeed come to Ljubljana with him, the real ones, not imaginary ones. Yet in the spin operations everything is inflated. The truth is never enough. SOVA’s actions also revealed its surveillance of the opposition (SDS), which the state intelligence service, whose leadership was appointed by Golob, carried out for the propaganda needs of the Freedom Movement. They informed the public, with full names and surnames, where they had detected Israelis. At SDS. Even though official authorities hide from the public even the names and surnames of murderers. And when it comes to sexual assaults, especially by foreign migrants, they even hide the event itself. When it comes to media spin operations, laws and rules do not apply. For the sake of preserving Golob’s power, SOVA stands above rules and above the law. The criminal offences they were supposedly investigating were, in fact, invented personally by Prime Minister Robert Golob. And the media repeated them like parrots. Because something always sticks. For example, some kind of “high treason” to foreign para‑intelligence services. They do not speak of real intelligence services or foreign governments, because Black Cube is none of those things.
Whom we actually elected in this election we will not know for some time. We have an electoral system in which we choose parties that later negotiate what we supposedly decided. The first negotiations will not be about the prime minister‑designate or the government. On Friday we will be watching who will lead parliament from now on. And it is certain that, because voters did not give a clear majority to either bloc, no one will be able to afford the shameful abuses we witnessed under Urška Klakočar Zupančič and Golob, when the governing coalition prevented the largest opposition party from overseeing the government (its spending of public money and its intelligence services) in parliament, and often did not even allow opposition MPs to speak. MPs of the smaller opposition party NSi were even criminally prosecuted because they nevertheless carried out oversight. And with that prosecution they revealed that NSi’s communications had also been monitored and used for the campaign. Nothing is sacred.
A third‑world country.
If such abuses stop, that alone will be good, no matter who ends up governing.