SLEEPING WITH PENGOVSKY

Exit, Židan

After six years of running the Social Democrats, Dejan Židan announced on Thursday that he is getting the fuck out of Dodge, leaving the party in the hands of its senior MEP Tanja Fajon.

Tanja Fajon taking over from Dejan Židan (*photo: SD*)

Obviously, Židan is not leaving the party itself as he has no reason to. He is, however, reducing himself to a lowly MP. Which he should, as his six years at the helm of the direct descendant of the Slovenian Communist party were, for all intents and purposes, a series of missed opportunities. It also provides a much-needed respite from bad pop-rock puns in post titles on this blog but that is another matter.

Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2

No matter how you look at it, Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša is not having a good post-epidemic. His majority in the parliament has shrunk down to a single vote in a matter of days, the biking protest movement shows no signs of abating and his onslaught against the public broadcaster somehow continues not to go according to plan. And to top it all off, there is his Twitter habit which keeps backfiring.

*PM Janša having his moment witht the BBC*

While there is no real danger of PM Janša again becoming ex-PM Janša anytime soon, shifting gears from the adrenaline-filled environment of political epidemiology to the mundane everyday of coalition-processed policy did not go smoothly for the Glorious Leader, and it showed.

Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1

For someone trying to pull the country back from the brink of economic collapse, prime minister Janša gives remarkably few fucks about the well-being of various enterprises around the country. With biking protests taking place every Friday evening and with recovery efforts becoming increasingly complex and hard to manage, the level of discontent in the country is increasing.

Not surprisingly, Janša, his SDS party and the base in general are not taking kindly to that and are proving remarkably thin-skinned for people who are quick to claim that hate speech doesn’t exist and that freedom of expression is paramount. Well, it seems like some freedoms of expression are more paramount than others.

Under Pressure

With 5000+ people protest-biking in the capital according to police estimates (press reports put the number at twice the range) and hundreds more in several other towns across the country, Muddy Hollows on Friday saw the largest anti-government protest since the Winter of Discontent.

*Part of the biking protest in Ljubljana as seen from the The Firm(tm)*

It was an outpouring of anger and frustration that had accumulated during the lockdown and are now boiling over. In part this is due to repeated executive overreach but mostly it was revelations of corruption and ineptitude at the highest levels of the government with regard to procurement of personal protective equipment and medical ventilators needed to curb the Covid-19 epidemic.

Depeche Mode

It took Janša 3.0 government less than a month to score its first international embarrassment. Which is quite a feat, considering that the country is in the middle of containing the Covid-19 epidemic. The crux of the matter is a “dispatch” sent by the Slovenian foreign ministry in which they rebuke an alert raised on the Council of Europe media freedom platform.

To cut a long story short, in a pair of tweets PM Janša accused the public broadcaster RTVSLO of running false stories, being overpaid and overstaffed. Various domestic and international journalism organisations raised a stink with the CoE and this required an official government response. The document turned out to be such a fucking train wreck that everyone – including the foreign ministry – started running away from it, pronto.