Polls, Tycoons And Delo

After a bit of a lull we have had a couple of new polls these past few days, when pengovsky was busy writing up the cultural clash. So what’s the score? Not all that suprising and on the whole things are not changing all that much. Pahor’s Social Democrats are still leading the polls and Janša’s ruling SDS is still unable to close the gap although it came close a couple of times. Careful observers will notice that percentages of some parties in certain polls vary wildly from their usual pattern, but do not be alarmed – we’ll discus it in one of the future posts, although I think you can pretty much find an explanation by yourselves. What is interesting, is the fact both parties seem to have entered an obivous downward trend…

…but this might change in the near future, as the right wing parties reached for some heavy artiliery today and convened a special session of the parliament, where they will debate some of the more controversial MBOs this country has seen in the last couple of years. Laško Brewery tops the list, naturally, followed closely by Istrabenz and Merkur as well as Terme Čatež, where an MBO is still underway. The list is very selective however, and while the coalition MPs will most likely spit fire and sulphur especially at Boško Šrot, the opposition will probably admit in passing that errors have been done in the past but claim that it is this government which enabled takeovers the size of Istrabenz and Laško, worth somewhere in the vicinity of one and two bilion euros respectively.

The session will obviously achieve nothing and is only convened because coalition parties are turning to their old and proven tricks. Namely: exactly four years ago, Janez Janša, then leader of the opposition, convened a special session of the parliament, where he sucessfully took appart the doings of the LDS-led government and its PM Tone Rop (now of Pahor’s SD). Well it wasn’t so much Janša’s sucess as it was a failure on Rop’s part who just wasn’t prepared and did play his cards right. And so Janša & Co. are doing it again, playing victim once more, although they are the ones in power, although it is true that at times they seem powerless to do anything. But we can put that down to incompetence rather than lack of power.

On the other hand, the opposition is not helped by the fact that Boško Šrot is having problems at Delo. Apparently he is having Janez Markeš, Delo’s Editor-in-Chief, replaced as of today. The unofficial version is that Markeš leaned Delo too much in the direction of Zares while Boško Šrot wants his newspaper to be more in favour of Pahor’s Social Democrats. Despite the fact that they usually describe the two parties as offsprings of the same political father (Milan Kučan, naturarlly), the right was quick to use this information, claiming that the opposition controls the media. The trick of course is, that opposition by definition cannot control the media (the latter can, however, be pro-opposition), but at the same time the government by definition must not control the media (which is exactly what this government had done until Janša-Šrot split).

However, I wouldn’t put it past Boško Šrot to say something like “stop supporting Golobič and back Pahor, or else…”. The man had several fits of megalomania recently, the last and most innapropriate being the one where he refused to attend the session of the Commerce Committee where he would be able to explain his view of Laško-Delo-Mercator deal with Janša. Instead, Šrot said that he would only address the plenary session of the parliament…. Err… What? Waddayoumean address the plenary session? Even the Prez must ask permission to address the Parliament, while you’d like to do it at your convenience? No go, Boško…

Anyway – Šrot is replacing Markeš, but my bet is that everyone involved in Delo takover now wants a share of the goodies and it suddenly turned out that the cake just ain’t big enough. Birdies from Delo, however, in part corroborate the story about Zares/SD switch.