Political newcomer Robert Golob defeated three-time Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa in elections on Sunday in a nation split by bitter political divisions over the rule of law.
Golob’s Freedom Movement, which he launched in January, has built on anger with Jansa’s regime in the former Yugoslav state.
The opposition accuses Jansa of having tried to undermine democratic institutions and press freedoms since he returned to power in 2020.
Photo: Reuters
With almost all the votes counted in the nation of about 2 million people, Freedom Movement stood at 34.5 percent of the vote compared with 23.6 percent for Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party.
“Our objective has been reached: a victory that will enable us to take the country back to freedom,” Golob told jubilant supporters late on Sunday.
“People want changes and have expressed their confidence in us as the only ones who can bring those changes,” he said earlier via a livestream from his home, where he was in isolation after contracting COVID-19.
The 55-year-old former power company manager has promised to restore “normality” to the nation, having billed the elections as a “referendum on democracy.”
Political analyst Miha Kovac said civil society and younger voters in particular had been mobilized.
Analysts had expected an increased turnout and for voters to turn against Jansa.
Turnout stood at about 70 percent of the 1.7 million electorate — significantly higher than the 52 percent in the last parliamentary elections in 2018.
“The vote was a vote against Jansa,” Kovac said. “Against Slovenia on the Hungarian path, against an illiberal democracy in Slovenia, against the government taking over the public television, against the control of judiciary.”
However, he said that Freedom Movement had no government experience — even though it could partner with the more experienced Social Democrats, who had 6.7 percent of the vote with almost all ballots counted.
“It’s like a company that abruptly grows,” Kovac added. “It has no infrastructure, no know-how, no people that know how to work in parliamentary bodies.”
Jansa, 63, an admirer of former US president Donald Trump, had campaigned on promises of stability.
“Ahead of the new government there are many challenges, but during our mandate we have set a solid ground for a peaceful navigation,” Jansa said late on Sunday. “It is easy to pay billboards, to have the backing of all media and the so-called civil society, but then hard work and challenges come, and there nothing of that can help you.”
Uros Esih, a columnist at Slovenian newspaper Delo, said ahead of the elections that they represented a “breaking point” with “liberal and illiberal political forces clashing” in Slovenia.
The rise of Golob began when he took over a small Green party without parliamentary seats in January, renaming it Freedom Movement.
He tapped into the protests that had developed since Jansa took power, as tens of thousands of people regularly attended anti-government rallies.
“I hope the situation will change... It is obvious that most of the people are not satisfied with this government and the way it’s governing,” Sara Rigler, a 21-year-old psychology student, said at a polling station in the capital Ljubljana earlier on Sunday.
Jansa’s image has been hurt by rows with Brussels over his moves to suspend funding to the national news agency, and to drag out the appointment of prosecutors to the bloc’s new anti-graft body.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not take center stage in Slovenia’s election campaign, although Jansa was among the first foreign leaders to travel to Kyiv, on March 15.
Jansa already served as prime minister between 2004 and 2008, and 2012 to 2013.
Only a year into his second term he was forced out by a corruption scandal.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS