On Sunday, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa was defeated in the country’s parliamentary election.
Jansa’s loss was largely welcomed by the Western media, which had called him an autocratic populist, and reported on Slovenia’s slide to the right and a sharp decline in democratic standards during his two-year leadership, an assessment backed up by reports from Freedom House and Amnesty International.
Taiwan’s response was always going to be more nuanced. In January, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) had called Jansa “a good friend of Taiwan” for his government’s plan to establish a representative office in Taiwan, and for his remarks that he supported Taiwan’s entry into the WHO and that Taiwanese should have the right to determine their future, without any pressure, military intervention or blackmailing from China.
Jansa had also criticized Beijing’s “ridiculous” response to Lithuania’s decision to open a representative office in Vilnius using the name Taiwan and called on the EU to stand by Lithuania in the dispute.
Taipei’s closeness to a political figure regarded as an autocrat could be regarded as a vulnerability, especially as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has been working hard to build Taiwan’s soft power through its democratic, open and progressive values, and to differentiate the nation from China under the autocratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime.
Despite comments about Jansa’s admiration for Viktor Orban, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary, his support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression and for Taiwan threatened by the CCP shows that he has been more supportive of democratic values than the final two years of his administration might suggest.
Jansa has also been regarded as anti-EU: He has criticized certain EU countries for placing economics over values in their dealings with the CCP, and in May last year, prior to Slovenia taking the reins of the EU’s rotating presidency, he wrote on Twitter: “We owe the EU nothing. We fought for our freedom and democracy 30 years ago.”
This perhaps spoke not of resentment for the EU, but of pride in his country’s struggle for democratization and independence from Yugoslavia three decades ago, and of the part he personally played in the process.
This might account for Jansa’s distaste for communist autocrats and his sense of empathy toward Taiwan: The parallels between, and timing of, Slovenia’s democratization and that of Taiwan’s is striking.
In the immediate post-World War II period, Slovenia became part of a larger federation, Yugoslavia, and went through a period of gradual liberalization after the 1980 death of Yugoslav “president for life” Josip Broz Tito until the movement for democratization and independence gained ground in 1987 with public anger over the “Trial Against the Four” — in which Jansa himself was a defendant — which precipitated the so-called Slovenian Spring.
The country held its first democratic election in 1990 and became independent in 1991, when the Yugoslav army was sent in. The Slovenians won that struggle, against all odds.
Soon after this, in the 1990s, Jansa facilitated the establishment of the Slovenian-Taiwanese Friendship Association in the Slovenian parliament.
On Tuesday, Department of European Affairs Director-General Remus Chen (陳立國) refused to be cornered on whether Jansa’s departure could jeopardize the plan to open a trade office.
Jansa has been a good friend to Taiwan, yet the goodwill from Slovenia comes also from the similarities not just in the two nations’ values, but also their recent histories. There is no reason the ministry cannot continue to work with the new administration under Robert Golob’s Freedom Movement.
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