By: Peter Jančič (Spletni časopis)
Prime Minister Robet Golob (Svoboda) dismissed Minister of Health Daniel Bešič Loredan (Svoboda) after the submission of an interpellation by SDS against him. Following Tatjana Bobnar (Svoboda), who was dismissed for not “depoliticising” the police decisively and in the right direction, another minister of this government has fallen, whom the media hailed as the best just a few months ago because the Prime Minister spoke highly of him. Journalists repeat. Parrots. Even the assessments of journalists that we heard before the resignation, stating that the SDS interpellation would unite the coalition ranks to unanimously support Bešič Loredan, did not materialise.
The deficit in the state budget is growing.
There was also inaccurate reporting about how the Svoboda party, during a closed-door consultation this week, stood behind its minister, who is also trusted by the President of the National Assembly, Urška Klakočar Zupančič. Until the Prime Minister. Erik Brecelj was considered a better prophet when he said that it is better for Slovenia not to have a Minister of Health than to have Minister Bešič Loredan. The President of the largest opposition party, Janez Janša (SDS), assessed the resignation more substantively: “The largest contribution of this government to reducing waiting lists so far.” Janša, however, focused more on another interesting event of the week. Namely, the record deficit in the state treasury in the first half of the year.
Prime Minister Golob stated that he and the minister parted ways regarding the assessment of the consequences of the intervention law, which allowed the ruling party to extend waiting lists in healthcare with over a hundred million euros from the state budget. For Golob, it is wrong because much of that money ended up with private individuals. That is where he disagreed with the minister. It did not bother him that they missed a good goal for which more than just pouring budget money would be necessary. The larger hole in the budget, without effect, is not solely Bešič Loredan’s fault. The majority of MPs increased the deficit of the state treasury for extending waiting lists with an intervention law on the government’s proposal. They will now be informed about the resignation of the minister, who will automatically become one of them. He will obtain a parliamentary mandate. The resignation of a minister who was hailed as the best by the media and even ranked highly in public opinion polls was celebrated the most in Levica, whose goal is more state presence in healthcare and not private individuals, from whom medical equipment and supplies cannot be sold at excessively high prices. Bešič Loredan is also a private individual who owns his own private healthcare institution, where he works as a doctor. He also worked there as a minister. Levica additionally accuses such doctors as being two-faced. But they themselves are two-faced. They have a whole range of private institutions. Minister Simon Maljevac, for example, founded a private institution called March 8th. Miha Kordiš gained fame as a young farmer with his private institution Tozd. As I warned some time ago, the state budget also operates with a deficit.
The resignation of Minister Bešič Loredan was probably the reason why on the day when Tatjana Bobnar and Prime Minister Golob were supposed to be questioned about the pressures they, together with the Secretary-General of Svoboda, Vesna Vuković, exerted on the police, the President of the Investigative Commission for Police Abuses, Miha Lamut (Svoboda), postponed the anticipated spectacle for an indefinite period. It would have been too much at once.
Nationalisation of healthcare price increases
This week, Levica achieved the nationalisation of voluntary health insurance in the National Assembly, which caused the government of Marjan Šarec to collapse just under four years ago. These “reforms”, as described by the leader of the Svoboda parliamentary group, Borut Sajovic, were not proposed by the government and Minister Bešič Loredan. The Svoboda MPs supposedly came up with the idea themselves. However, the government managed to postpone the nationalisation from September to New Year’s. The reason for nationalisation is that insurance companies intended to raise prices due to higher healthcare costs. The higher costs will remain even after nationalisation. They will be paid by the state budget. This will increase the deficit of the state treasury, which is already record-breaking.
Almost simultaneously with Bešič Loredan’s resignation, the last in a series of early changes in the leadership of the largest healthcare institutions in the country occurred, for which he became famous as a minister. He resolved problems by removing directors. He stumbled with Antonija Poplas Susič, the director of ZD Ljubljana, because Zoran Janković protected her. Anton Crnjac, the head of the Maribor Clinical Centre, also had to leave after resisting for some time and eventually signing an agreement to terminate his function. In September, Jože Golobič, the director of UKC Ljubljana, resigned, and in December, the council removed Aleksander Svetelšek, the director of the General Hospital Celje, and Franc Vindišar, the medical director. At the end of July last year, Andreja Uštar, the general director of the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, resigned. To name a few important ones.
Vojko Flis, who was a mayoral candidate for Svoboda, will become the director of the Maribor Clinical Centre. He is a proven cadre. Just like Bešič Loredan. The purges are about that and not about the well-being of healthcare. However, the ruling parties, despite their efforts, have not yet succeeded in removing Andrej Grah Whatmough from the top of RTV Slovenija. He became the supervisor of RTV Slovenija and the head of the supervisory board as a representative of SMC during the government of Miro Cerar. He rose from the position of the head of the supervisory board to the position of the general director. He became the supervisor amid sharp protests from SDS because the former left-wing majority in the National Assembly cheated and assigned the position that should have gone to SDS to SMC. If they elected someone from the opposition, they might have chosen a candidate from the smaller NSi. They continue to do so today, but now in the most important supervisory committees in parliament. Both the ones responsible for overseeing intelligence services and public finances are led by politicians from the small opposition NSi. Not SDS, which was supported by many more voters.
The fact that Grah Whatmough rose to the top to hinder SDS from the left does not help him today. As it did not help Bobnar or Bešič Loredan. The private institution March 8th of Levica and “independent” journalists attacked Grah Whatmough last week almost as they did during the worst Stalinist times. They publicly discredited him as much as they could, claiming that he was unwilling to accept the mail with which, with the help of detectives, the coalition’s cadre was trying to remove him from the RTVS Council, even though the coalition had already dismissed him by changing the law. Now they are removing him as the interim director until the election of the actual one. This is completely bizarre because even the interim director, Grah Whatmough, will only be in the position for another week, as the selection process for the new director is nearing completion. So why is the new RTVS council hastily removing the already ousted director for the second time and accusing him of evading further dismissal? There is only one reason: public discrediting and humiliation.
They are kicking a dead horse with all their might. Extremely “courageous”. If anyone even looks at Nika Kovač the wrong way, they immediately call the police for help. The Prime Minister leads the council against hate speech, but she herself sets an excellent example of what she fights against: double standards of freedom of speech and hatred.
This public humiliation of someone who has already been dismissed shows that he has greatly offended the government coalition by not preventing the employment of Rajko Gerič. Gerič is one of the most experienced journalists, editors, and media leaders currently in the country, with union experience as well. He disturbed the new “non-governmental” top echelon that the coalition appointed to the Council of RTV Slovenija. General Secretary of Svoboda, Vesna Vuković, had already gotten rid of Gerič as the director of TSmedia with the help of the new management of Telekom last year to facilitate an early replacement of the editor-in-chief of Siol.net. Me. And then she appointed her own candidate, Mihael Šuštaršič, as the editor there, so that the portal no longer publishes critical stories about Golob and Vuković’s actions. However, after six months, Gerič is not on the street, as was the plan of Svoboda. Instead, he is the editor at the even more influential RTVS, where he once led the news programme. A nightmare for Vuković and Golob. Moreover, Gerič is now a candidate for the directorship of RTVS and is even considered the most qualified among the applicants.
Of course, he will not be chosen because the criterion is not about being literate; it is about being “one of us”. The criterion of Svoboda.
These stories will eventually end, just like the tenure of the best Minister of Health of all time, Bešič Loredan.
Who suddenly is no longer one of us.