Following snap elections on 13 July Slovenian parliament held an inaugural session on Friday which – if one attempted to describe it in full – would be somewhere between a Monty Python act, a wake and select scenes from They Live. In fact, what we had today was people an exercise in different planes of reality converging into the same point of the time-space continuum. The results were predictably ugly.
Pahor and Janša make it to 9gag. That’s one off the bucket-list (source)
On one hand we had Janez Janša, the jailed leader of the SDS who was granted a short leave of his prison sentence to attend the session, providing for an extraordinary situation where a convicted criminal serving a prison sentence is elected and starts serving as an MP. On the other side there were a couple of hundred protestors in front of the parliament who demanded the release of Janez Janša from prison, called him a political prisoner and a martyr. Next, there was Janša’s SDS which refused to make nominations in a key parliamentary committee, vowing to do the same for every other parliamentary body until they are given assurances new elections will be held as soon as Janša is acquitted (as the faithful believe will and protest in front of the court daily to happen). Still further, however, are the trials and tribulations of PM-presumptive Miro Cerar who is paying a heavy price for his hardball tactics in the Slovenian EU Commissioner issue. Cerar has all but spent whatever progress he had had with Karl Erjavec of DeSUS and is, for all intents and purposes back to square one in coalition negotiations. If he ever left square one at all, that is. Oh, and then there’s the reality of President Pahor quoting Churchill again and (again) admitting he didn’t know his ass-hole from his ear-hole when he handled the outbreak of crisis in 2008.
You can’t always get what you want
The ugly part is that no-one got what they wanted and yet everyone got more than what they bargained for. Case in point being Milan Brglez, the man thought to be the brains behind Miro Cerar Party (SMC) and widely tipped to be the next foreign minister (on account of his international studies tenure at the Faculty of Social Sciences), was forced to accept the nomination for the Speaker of the parliament. This brings about an unusual situation where the Speaker of the Parliament, a post usually manned by the second largest coalition party, is a member of the largest coalition party which is now poised to occupy the upper-most levels of both executive and legislative branches. That it was Miro Cerar, the legalist and a man of high democratic standard, who had to break what little democratic tradition this country has, is especially ironic.
Having said that, it is possible that – regardless of his and Cerar’s statements – Brglez as Speaker is only a temporary solution. You know, just to get the parliament up-and-running. But for Brglez to make the switch to Foreign Ministry (a.k.a. Mladika, as the building is called), a lot of things must happen, chief among them being DeSUS actually joining Cerar’s coalition and Erjavec wanting to quite as foreign minister and take over as parliament chief. Either that or becoming EU commissioner (yeah, right 🙂 ). Brglez’s chances of clinching the top foreign-affairs job would increase greatly if his party boss were to cobble a coalition sans DeSUS. And if days ago Cerar and his people were wondering why they would make their lives difficult by not inviting Erjavec to the ruling gang, they’re probably starting to see that political life with Erjavec in tow is much more difficult than without him. But, as things stand, Cerar went from setting the pace to putting out fires in a matter of days. He needs to get his act together, fast.
The person who, amazingly, did hold her act together on Friday was Marjana Kotnik Poropat, an MP for DeSUS who, by virtue of being the oldest MP, chaired the inaugural session. Poropat, obviously coached and prepared, rejected every attempt Jože Tanko, head of SDS parliamentary group, made to derail the parliament from day one. Tanko made numerous procedural demands most of which had to do with MPs confirming the election results, thus finding they do indeed hold the mandate of the people and can start their work. The SDS, however, refused to appoint their members to the relevant committee and called for the parliament legal service to form an opinion on whether these committees can be established if not all parties appoint members. Further to that Tanko demanded time to stuy the legal service’s opinion, obviously trying to extend and possibly derail the parliament even before it would even formally establish itself. Poropat would have none of that and rebuffed Tanko repeatedly, much to annoyance of SDS masters of procedure and to amazement of the interested public (i.e. the Slovenian tweetosphere which had a field day yesterday).
Prison break
Whether Tanko was following a real plan or was just buying time for his boss remains a mystery. Namely, Janez Janša got a daily pass to leave prison and attend the session of the parliament to which he was elected. This predictably precipitated all sorts of false dilemmas on whether his mandate should be confirmed or not, whether he is fit to stand as MP or not et cetera. But the issue is indeed a fairly simple one. While an MP, sentenced to a prison term of six monts or more can be stripped of office (by a majority vote of his colleagues), there is currently no law that would prohibit a convict to stand for elections. Which is precisely the case with Janša. And since he was legally elected, MPs had no choice but to confirm his mandate, leaving it for later (and probably quite soon) to navigate the legal minefield of stripping Janša of his MP status.
Because as things stand now, the leader of the opposition gets to leave the prison every time he has stuff scheduled in the parliament and gets to complain that “even the old Yugoslav regime treated him better than Slovenian authorities do”. Which is bullshit, of course, but Janša and the SDS are forced tp resort to increasingly preposterous lies in order to maintain the enthusiasm of the faithful. But still, it must have been quite a downer to see only three-hundred people, mostly well beyond retirement age, chanting his name, cursing the communist conspiracy that runs the country and demanding Janša be released from prison. Which proved for a lot bizarre scenes where Janša went to meet his supporters during a break in session and the flock shouted that he should be let out of prison while he was there. In all honesty, factually, they are correct. But in terms of space and time, well… They funny 🙂
But the scenery was even more bizzare than the content. The Janša crowd gathered in a small park on the West side of the parliament and spent hours chanting to their hero, praising him as the saviour of the nation and insisting the country will not be free until he is. But long gone are the days when tens of thousands chanted Janša’s name in front of the parliament, like in 1994 when Janša was being removed from the post of defence minister in the wake of Depala vas Affair. From 30.000 to 300 people in twenty years is a sure-fire sign that Janša’s political star is fading. In a true Freudian twist, Friday’s pro-Janša rally was held only ten metres away from the tomb of national heroes. In the end, we’re all dead. Politically or for real.
Please, stop quoting Churchill
But stupidity, she is immortal. Case in point being President Pahor’s speech which was, as per usual, high on big words but low on actual content (but, admittedly, still much better than his Lorem Ipsum speech aboard Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior days ago). In his parliament speech Pahor invoked Churchill and said that “after years of trying to solve the crisis the wrong way we now finally know what it is all about and can do it the right way”. Now, quoting Churchill is one of Pahor’s favourite political activities. And to be honest, Churchill is a quotable man with much to be quoted about. But what President Pahor was alluding to, however, was supposed Churchill statement that one can count on America to do the right thing after it had done everything else.
Now, for starters, President Pahor freely admitted that all of his 2008-2011 bravado, long-as-fuck press conferences and moving small red and green dots on a magnetic board that represented reform attempts, he didn’t know shit about tackling the crisis. You know, not even an “oops, sorry”. Just more bravado to the tune of “we finally nailed it this time.” Unfortunately, he didn’t. You see, the quote is taken out of context. What Churchill was supposedly referring to was an intervention of an outside power in what was then still a European armed conflict. Which of course is somewhat different from “we finally know what to do now”. And just to add insult to injury: Churchill never actually said that. So much for knowing how to tackle the crisis, when you can’t even pick a correct Churchill quote.But hey, as president, you can do whatever you like, I guess. Even shake hands with a convicted felon. Figure the tomb of national heroes won’t be needing an expansion any time soon after all.
