by Metod B.
At the end of October, economist Jože P. Damijan (with the support of intellectuals from the Forum 21 network) sent a program document to the leaders of the coalition parties SMC, NSi and DeSUS with the priorities of the new left-wing government until the 2022 elections, which were previously supposedly agreed in the opposition parties LMŠ, SD, Levica and SAB, and an invitation to talks.
Well, NSi was the first to reject his invitation, and yesterday the SMC also rejected it. DeSUS is expected to announce its decision after its election congress in early December. But it is clear that a possible transfer to a new left-wing coalition would not pay off for them, as they have achieved by far the most in the current Janša government, for the interests of pensioners, so far.
But at the moment, what’s more interesting is that within the so-called Coalition of the Constitutional Arc (KUL) and also beyond, there is a complete distrust, which they can barely hide from the Slovenian public.
Jože P. Damijan himself pointed this out in an interview for yesterday’s Mladina.
Mladina: Can you guarantee that the coalition parties of your coalition have changed and that this time it will be different and that the leaders will not argue at every slightest dilemma?
Damijan: »This narcissism of small differences is dramatic and will always exist because we have six parties in the center-left fighting for their political bread As long as we have such a configuration, each party will emphasize only itself, its contribution. The substantive part, the consensus on the necessary reforms, measures or political priorities, is clear and has been harmonized quickly. However, I am afraid that each of the parties with which we will form a new government will start to pull to its side, especially in public appearances. In the previous government of Marjan Šarec, you had a problem between the SAB and DeSUS because the SAB started addressing the voters of the DeSUS party. And teasing between the Levica and SD and between LMŠ and SMC. I am a realist, I do not rule this out, there is not much time until the elections and I know that this cannibalism between them will be revived. « …
In the continuation of the interview for Mladina, Damijan also admitted that the “ties” they are building are still “very fragile”.
Damijan: »You have to remember how this former coalition led by Marjan Šarec broke up – with great mutual accusations and resentments. The Prime Minister resigned without saying anything to anyone before, not even to his members of parliament. These resentments are still here and everyone of course wants the assurance that something like this will not happen again. But I’m not a problem here myself, I’m someone who calms passions and unites. So far, I’ve tried to amortize resentments at negotiations. The problem, however, is that the parties we are proposing, in particular, do not yet fully trust the suitors and do not fully believe that any of them will not jump out of the coalition prematurely.«
Well, as these words of Jože P. Damijan show, there is not only a lot of mistrust between potential coalition parties, but also between LMŠ, SD, Levica and SAB and Damijan himself.
Namely, as he admitted in an interview with Mladina, these parties are ready to support him only on the condition that he himself – or his party – will not run in the next elections.
Mladina: You say you are coming as prime minister temporarily, until the next election. What if the parties ask you to run?
Damijan: »They won’t. I even had to make a commitment not to run in the next election – and I was happy to make that commitment.«
In short, the resentments within the so-called KUL coalition are not even remotely smoothed out. There is a lot of mistrust and rivalry between the parties LMŠ, SD, Levica and SAB. At the same time, there is a great deal of distrust of these parties towards Jože P. Damijan himself as the technical prime minister, as these parties fear that with the media promotion he now receives from the dominant media, in the case of his solo performance, he would pick up many electoral votes from them.
And they would find themselves even more on the periphery of the Slovenian political space, as they are already unnecessarily lost in the politically amorphous KUL coalition, which has no real future. In the opposition, it is necessary to work on the recognisability of an individual party, and not on the recognisability of some self-proclaimed coalition, which was conceived by the godfathers from the background under the leadership of Gregor Golobič.
In short, if they happened to be able to form a government, they would quarrel again the very next day …
If not, then probably much earlier …