By: Dr Metod Berlec
With the start of the European Football Championship in Germany, public attention has temporarily shifted from the European elections to cheering for the Slovenian national football team—our football heroes. Nevertheless, it is still worth touching upon post-election analyses. One such analysis was conducted during the Saturday session of the SDS Council.
The party notes that SDS achieved a convincing victory in the recent European Parliament elections, both in terms of the number of votes received and the number of mandates won. SDS alone secured more parliamentary mandates than all three parties of the ruling coalition combined. For the first time in its history, it achieved a result exceeding 30 percent, making it one of the best results among all lists and parties participating in the 2024 European Parliament elections across EU member states. Additionally, SDS contributed four-fifths (with NSi contributing one-fifth) to the best individual national result within the European People’s Party (EPP) political group. According to Zvone Černač, the president of the SDS Council, who authored the accepted analysis, SDS achieved this victorious result through the collective efforts of all party members and local committees active during and before the campaign, the exceptional engagement of the entire team of candidates and their collaborators during the campaign, the original approaches by SDM in the campaign, the prominent involvement of both incumbent SDS MEPs in the last term, and the synchronised activities of the SDS Parliamentary Group in the National Assembly and the councillors’ group in the National Council of the Republic of Slovenia.
In SDS, they assess that the party formed a strong candidate list in a timely manner and was the first to present an electoral manifesto with the party’s views on the future of the EU, maintaining a focus on substantial discussion about the future of the EU throughout the campaign. Due to the ruling coalition’s tendency and their media monopoly to impose discussions on topics such as marijuana, euthanasia, and Palestine instead of the future of Slovenia in the EU, SDS was “forced to lead the pre-election battle on a field imposed by others.” Additionally, in this election campaign, SDS faced the traditional negative, exclusionary approach of the transitional left, characterised by the “left is good, right is evil” pattern, which most voters did not fall for this time. At the end of the election campaign, the transitional left unsuccessfully attempted to concentrate votes for the Gibanje Svoboda party to at least become the relative winner of the elections. Furthermore, the transitional left again misused state institutions during the election campaign to interfere with the campaign, such as the depoliticised police conducting a raid at the headquarters of Nova24TV, summoning critical journalists for questioning, the prosecution filing an indictment against the former director of UKOM and TV Slovenia, the judiciary announcing a new trial against the SDS president, and a secret police collaborator being used to organise the “extremist anti-migrant” group SOS, which was publicly attributed to SDS. The party also highlights that, for the first time in the history of European Parliament elections in Slovenia, “leftist NGOs, heavily funded from abroad and the state budget, were strongly engaged in support of the ruling transitional left, did not report the election campaign, and remained outside the oversight of the Court of Audit of the Republic of Slovenia”.
SDS notes that they were only partially successful with their demands for “transparent and fair elections”. They will continue to strive for this. Additionally, SDS predicts that (first) a “significantly more balanced European Parliament (EP) will no longer support the transitional left in abusing the rule of law and suppressing freedom of speech”, thus creating “favourable conditions for a more successful defence of Slovenian democracy”; (second), they foresee that in the new composition of the EP, the “victorious European People’s Party (EPP) will eventually form a broader, balanced coalition that reflects the voters’ clearly expressed desire for more prudent EU policies, which will include at least one political group from the conservative pole of the EP”; (third) they believe that “the defeat of the ruling parties in the EP elections will likely affect the duration of the second half of the government’s and National Assembly’s terms”, and given the “daily proven inability of the ruling coalition to resolve outstanding issues, preliminary elections are very likely”; (fourth) they highlight a “high likelihood that the ruling coalition will rush constitutional changes, aiming to introduce the secret appointment of judges and abolish electoral districts with the support of NSi”. The case of Nova Slovenia party shows that their unprincipled, so-called opportunistic alliance with the ruling left coalition, especially with the Gibanje Svoboda, did not pay off in the European elections, as they barely secured a European parliamentary mandate. In contrast, under Janez Janša’s leadership, SDS’s principled, substantial, and professional political conduct has borne fruit, securing four European parliamentary mandates with a convincing victory.
