By: Peter Jančič
Because Tarča revealed too much about Robert Golob, Tina Gaber, Miha Piškur, Andrej Ribič, and Tamara Vonta a week ago, Erika Žnidaršič had to go on sick leave again, and this time it will, by all indications, be permanent.
Editor‑in‑chief Polona Fijavž announced: “I no longer have confidence in this Tarča team.” Fijavž became editor‑in‑chief after the political purge of the RTVS leadership carried out by the government of Robert Golob. The purge was carried out so that the new leadership of RTV Slovenia would help ensure that Svoboda, SD, and Levica remain in power for another term. For that purpose, they were expected to discredit the opposition. But instead, Tarča has been causing problems for Golob. A week ago, they revealed that he vacationed with Tina Gaber at the Stari dvor hotel on Ugljan, invited by Miha Piškur, the son of the hotel’s co‑owner and the owner and director of the company DC Limited, which also works for Dars and Gen‑I Sonce. When this week’s continuation of the Tarča episode was cancelled, they additionally pointed out that DC Limited received almost 150,000 euros from both companies last year, with the amount being even higher because the payment data from Gen‑I Sonce are not publicly accessible. According to Tarča, these companies organise fake online profiles that praise only the clients of DC Limited (Dars, Gen‑I, Cugelj windows, Biostile). The only exception is Gibanje Svoboda, Robert Golob, and Tina Gaber, their fake profiles praise them as well, even though everyone officially denies any connection between DC Limited and Svoboda. Also present on Ugljan was Tone Krkovič, who claims to have no memory of the event, and the politically appointed DARS director from Svoboda, Andrej Ribič.
“I no longer have confidence!” With these words, Polona Fijavž shut down Tarča in order to protect the government.
In response to Fijavž’s loss of confidence, and thus the cancellation of Tarča, the opposition parties SDS and NSi withdrew from participating in RTV Slovenia’s pre‑election debates. It is very clear that journalists there are being prevented from doing fair work because of the interests of the ruling parties. And that means the debates will not be credible.
Even before the announcement “I no longer have confidence in this Tarča team,” RTV had been sending firm denials of journalists’ reports that the RTV leadership had banned the continuation of Tarča. They claimed that “Tarča has never been cancelled because of its content, and not this time either.” These statements were sent to the media without signatures, making it impossible to determine who was making the claims. Meanwhile, the Tarča team responded to these leadership “anonymous statements” on Facebook with an extensive explanation stating the exact opposite: that the episode was cancelled because they were forbidden from airing the planned continuation and because they received a written “warning of possible action against the editorial team if the episode aired as planned.”
The completely different explanations of the same event share one common point: the recent Tarča episode about Robert Golob’s vacation with Tina Gaber, which greatly angered the ruling coalition. “I have repeatedly demanded that they adhere to programming standards and pointed out when they were not sufficiently respected,” Fijavž said. These programming standards, to put it plainly, mean that events and backgrounds that are inconvenient for the prime minister, his partner, and the parties Svoboda, SD, and Levica must not be revealed, because it is essential to secure another term for them at the top of the government, and thus also another term for the RTVS leadership appointed by the current government. Including Polona Fijavž.
The rather brutal clash at RTV Slovenia is part of a broader pattern in which we are witnessing similar abuses in other important state institutions where the ruling parties have carried out political purges. Žan Mahnič (SDS), who appeared on Tarča last week when Vonta refused to participate, responded as follows:
This week, the prosecution dismissed yet another criminal complaint against former Interior Minister Aleš Hojs (SDS), at whose home investigators carried out a house search a few months ago based on the completely absurd claim that five years earlier, as interior minister, he had allegedly been giving the Kavač clan information about when the police planned to investigate them. Hojs, as interior minister, did not have access to such information. The idea that traces of information he never possessed could be found five years later by searching his home was madness. It was clear that this was pre‑election smearing. Information had indeed been leaking to the Kavač clan, Damijana Žišt reported in Večer in 2021 that it came from an employee of the very same prosecutor’s office that, before the elections, began investigating Hojs. Unlike Hojs, the prosecution did have access to the information.
The explanation for the house search against Hojs was simple: political abuse for an election campaign. Some people will believe it. On top of that, by seizing his phone and other communication devices, investigators could obtain additional information about what was happening in the opposition, information useful to the ruling parties. Why this matters is shown by another pre‑election move by the prosecution, identical in nature to the Hojs case: it filed an indictment against NSi MPs who serve as parliamentary overseers responsible for checking whether the police, prosecution, and judiciary are abusing their powers to obtain information for smearing the opposition during the campaign. Matej Tonin, Janez Žakelj, Jožef Horvat, and Jernej Vrtovec are accused by the prosecution of revealing a state secret, namely, that the police were not wiretapping the DARS director and NSi politician Valentin Hajdinjak. This accusation is just as absurd as the one against Hojs. The police collected information on NSi MPs through a similar investigation to the one used against Hojs from SDS, only this time targeting Valentin Hajdinjak from NSi. They seized his communication devices, claiming they were checking DARS’s business operations, but in reality they were gathering information on opposition politicians for the benefit of the ruling parties.
The police began investigating Hajdinjak when the ruling coalition was removing him from the top of DARS in order to install Svoboda politician Andrej Ribič. It was yet another in a series of political purges, and investigations used to collect information on political rivals for pre‑election smearing. The police (and the prosecution) can be politically misused because Prime Minister Robert Golob carried out extensive political purges within the police itself. This became highly public because it led to a serious conflict with former interior minister Tatjana Bobnar, from Golob’s own ranks, who opposed subordinating the police to political control. Why are politically appointed police officials important? Because they decide whom to investigate and whose data to collect, and they can pass that information on for Golob’s election campaigns. And they did. How do we know? Because the prosecution itself revealed this when, right before the elections, it began prosecuting the four NSi MPs.
As with Hojs, this is about media smearing, not about actually pursuing a real court case against the MPs. Such a case would be a major international scandal, and one has already erupted, because the European Parliament reacted to the announcement of the prosecution. The ruling coalition likely did not expect such a strong response. Matej Tonin was elected to the European Parliament and is now more protected from Robert Golob’s harassment than the other NSi MPs. That this is an abuse for campaign purposes is shown by another detail: criminal proceedings against MPs are only possible if Parliament authorises them. This is especially important when proceedings are initiated against MPs because of their parliamentary oversight work, and initiated by the very institutions they are overseeing. Under the constitution, MPs have immunity, which they can waive, but they cannot do so if they are not even told what they are accused of, and no procedure has been initiated in Parliament to decide on their immunity, which would be required if this were a real criminal case.
These are merely unusual media reports from unofficial sources used to smear NSi MPs and the opposition, just as in the fabricated accusations against Hojs.
The bizarre nature of the communication is shown by my request to RTVS to explain what their claim means that the reason for cancelling Tarča was an “unexpected absence in the team.” I wrote to them: “Please explain who, by name and surname, was absent from the team, what kind of absence it was, and what the reason for it was.” They replied, of course without a signature, as follows: “RTV Slovenia is obliged to protect employees’ personal data, so we cannot provide information about who was absent from work and for what reason.”
Even the fact that Erika Žnidaršič had to go on sick leave again, this time for a much longer period, is a secret of this “public RTVS.”
Although we all know what kind.