By: Miro Petek
These days mark 25 years since that Ash Wednesday when paid criminals, acting on orders from the Carinthian economic underworld, came to kill me in front of my house. And these days, I am not only reliving bitter memories, but also becoming aware once again that in Slovenia, crime pays off.
We have created a country in which crime is a rational choice, because the expected benefit is greater than the risk and the expected harm. The likelihood that criminals will be detected and sanctioned is low, and selective rules apply to the Slovenian political and economic elite. Although formal equality exists, in reality the law works efficiently for the poor but slowly and complicatedly for the elite; with procedural manoeuvres and highly paid lawyers that only the wealthy can afford, the chances of a case expiring or ending in acquittal are greater than the chances of punishment. The legal process is, of course, very important, but the procedural tricks enabled by legislation and used by well‑paid lawyers have today become a stronger tool than justice and truth. In Slovenia, the law is often barely connected to fairness, but rather to power relations in society. The mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, could say a great deal about this.
I learned firsthand how important a role capital plays and how decisively it can influence decisions in individual court cases. In my case, the stakes of the wealthy elites from Carinthia were enormous, because an entire chain of people had to be bribed for the process to eventually collapse, starting with that unfortunate hidden witness who was rewarded for testifying by the police, meaning by the state. And for changing their testimony, the underworld’s reward was even greater: providing an alibi was practically a lifelong pension. Even a journalist or two got a crumb in their pocket. The judge from Murska Sobota was promoted to president of the court after this judicial farce, and the Carinthian criminal investigators took up important positions at the national level. No one dealt with the money laundering in the state bank that I had been uncovering in my articles. Whoever has capital in Slovenia is safe from prosecution; the final calculation is positive: crime pays, capital multiplies. And we ourselves are largely to blame, because during the privatisation process we watched with little reaction as the post‑communist elite appropriated a large part of the nation’s assets. Instead of outrage, protest, or demands for the rule of law, we lethargically shrugged, saying they had simply managed to get by.
Robert Golob added another lie to this: so far, none of his lies, whether consciously spoken or uttered out of confusion, have been sanctioned. Lies have benefited him because people believed them, because they did not question whether what he said was true or not. If Slovenia had a non‑ideological social science, Golob’s term in office would have to be studied as a phenomenon of the lie as a tool of power, since he practically institutionalised lying; it became his governing strategy, blurring the line between reality and fabrication. Facts were expelled from political discourse because they are the greatest enemy of lies, while opinions were easily adjusted to fit political goals.
Only a few weeks separate us from seeing whether lying in politics truly pays off. We will see whether common sense and truth have really abandoned our country, just as young intellectuals and entrepreneurs have been leaving it in recent years. We will see whether Slovenians still expect truth from politicians, or whether apathy and exhaustion with politics have become so deeply rooted in our subconscious that we no longer reflect on the symptom of lying and instead surrender ourselves to the influence of the media, which have become allies and messengers of lies rather than watchdogs of those in power. We will see whether we are capable of reflection and whether we refuse to dismiss politics with the mantra that “they are all the same” and “everyone lies,” and instead show a willingness to uncover the truth.
In the end: crime still pays off today, and lying pays off. The question is, how much longer?