Alt-F4 For Emilija Stojmenova Duh

Originally, this post was to be about PM Robert Golob finally finding a new defence minister. And a new education minister, while he was at it. But while those two will eventually get a mention on this here blog, the story this week is about Emilija Stojmenova Duh, who resigned as minister of digital transformation on Thursday.

Emilija Stojmenova Duh in a Microsoft Windows frame, about to be closed.
Emilija Stojmenova Duh getting her political window closed

The embattled digital minister has been on the chopping block for some time, for reasons that were both within and without her purview. And while the Big Bird reiterated that he has the minister’s back, it didn’t take long for him to push her under the proverbial bus. Or, in this case, under a government limousine with flashing blue lights.

Emilija Stojmenova Duh is, or rather was, one of the new-faces contingent following the 2022 electoral rout. An accomplished engineer and educator, she was a professor at the Ljubljana Faculty of electrical engineering and widely seen as one of traiblazers for women in STEM.

Minister presumptive

She was also very vocal in criticising the often self-serving digital policies of the last Janša government. As such she was soon in the mix to replace the fake-it-till-you-make-it NSi digital minister Mark Boris Andrijanič. She joined the Social Democrats a few months before the election and just missed making the parliamentary cut.

As Robert Golob divvied up government portfolios, the digital ministry (officially, ministry for digital transformation) ended up with GS rather than SD. This, however, did not stop Stojmenova Duh, who was still seen as well suited to the posting. All she needed to to was to change her party affiliation from SD to GS. Which she did.

It needs to be said at this point, that there is a fair amount of sexism at play here. ESD, as she became affectionately known, was soon painted as a conniving backstabbing witch, using the SD to propel her in the vicinity of her dream job and then switching teams to make the home run. As if. Tasteless? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

It’s different when men do it

It’s just that when men do it, it’s smart politics. At the very least, that’s what the likes of former PM Rop, former Speaker Brglez, or the erstwhile Great Survivor of Muddy Hollows political cesspool, Jani Moderndorfer, to name but a few.

But in cases where the SD was involved (and there were many), transfers almost always went one way. To the benefit of the party. And woe unto anyone who dared go the opposite way. This bit will become important later on.

But once she was appointed minister for digital whathaveyou, Emilija Stojmenova Duh soon found out that qualities that made her a stand-out candidate for a top government job turned into debilitating inhibitions when shit got real.

Her first order of business was to untangle the mess that was a digital literacy project that her predecessor left behind. Which took way longer than expected or even advertised and cost ESD a whole lot of good. And when things finally started taking shape, it turned out that not many people were buying what ESD was selling.

There are 13,000 laptops in Logatec

An even more eye-popping example of you may build it but they still won’t come was and still is the laptop fund.

The idea was as commendable as it was naive. There are households in Slovenia that just can’t afford proper IT equipment. They may have a PC or a laptop but it would usually be an under-powered piece of junk. Or maybe something on loan from mum’s office. So, the thinking went, why shouldn’t the government buy a few decent laptops and hand them out to those in need?

I mean, free laptops, what could possibly go wrong?

Turns out that you can’t give out a government freebie without at least some criteria. And if you make the mistake of wanting to do it right, things get really complicated really fast.

But what ESD and her team did was they bought the laptops first and only then tried to figure out the criteria. Which took the better part of the last two years. All the while the computers were stashed in a warehouse, mostly collecting dust.

Katie Melua had 9 million bicycles in Beijing, Emilija Stojmenova Duh has 13 thousand laptops in Logatec.

The laptop saga earned ESD not one, but two votes of no-confidence. And while she survived the first one without much trouble, she was widely considered to have done a piss-poor job of explaining herself to the parliament. The fact that she kept her job early this year rests purely on a disciplined coalition vote.

The gift that kept on giving

However, only nine months later, ESD was up for a rematch, as SDS filed for another no-confidence vote against her, more or less on the same grounds. What changed in between was the fact that the anti-graft agency and its counterpart protecting the competition concluded that the laptop purchase was not ship-shape.

That’s the thing with public finances. You just can’t go running around buying stuff because you woke up with a project in your head. And besides, the idea was that her digital literacy project would fare way better than that of her predecessor, where kids ended up using their 150 euro voucher to buy a pair of airpods.

Thus, with her second no-confidence vote inside a year, Emilija Stojmenova Duh was not in the best of places, politically. Not in the least because the laptop fiasco just wouldn’t go away.

Sure, the Apex Aviary was fully behind her, but going on previous experience, this sounded more like a death sentence than a show of support. And while the coalition agreement stipulated that GS, Levica and SD would not actively partake in toppling each other’s ministers, they could always abstain from a vote. So, the political ground beneath ESD started shifting considerably.

Blue disco

But the straw that broke the camel’s back turned out to be an event back in May, when Stojmenova Duh was en route to Vienna airport. Her civilian government car got stuck in a traffic jam on the Autobahn, whereupon the driver turned on the emergency blue lighting and passed the plebs, making sure his boss caught the flight.

Obviously, pulling this sort of this is wrong six ways to Sunday.

First of all, by using the emergency lighting, ESD had her car turn from an ordinary civilian car which just happened to be carrying a semi-important official of a friendly neighbouring country, into an government vehicle on official business, on foreign soil.

Sure, in terms of breaches of diplomatic protocol you could do far worse than that, but this was pretty fucking bad.

Second, even on the correct side of the border, running errands does not constitute official government business necessitating the blue disco. About to be late for a studio appearance? Tough luck. Gonna miss a school performance? Sorry, not sorry. Boarding almost completed? Well, plan better.

We’ve been here before

One would think that similar incidents involving then-ministers Patrik Vlačič in 2009 and Marko Bandelli in 2018 would have sufficed in making elected officials understand that privileges come with additional obligations.

But hubris and arrogance were and are the greatest threat to any politician. Especially if this happens to be their first rodeo.

Speaking of entitlement, things didn’t end there for ESD. Namely, her office then tried to have an Austrian speeding ticked quashed, asking the Slovenian embassy in Vienna to formally intervene. The embassy declined and rightly so.

And finally, ESD went full Nixon and committed the classic mistake of making the cover-up even worse than the crime. When the story leaked (and the timing was by no means a coincidence), she tried denying it at first. And when that didn’t work, she tried to blame the driver, saying she wasn’t aware of emergency lighting regulation. Which is as shitty a move as they get.

Slovenian government drivers are generally considered loyal and dedicated people. They do as they are told, they keep their principals safe and for the most part make sure everyone is where they need to be when they need to be there. Making her driver take the fall is just bad form and generally frowned upon.

Politically tone-deaf

At this point, this whole thing was becoming a major embarrassment. ESD pulled a highly problematic stunt on foreign soil, then tried to use a get-out-of-jail-free card, included an ever larger circle of people whom she expected to come to her defence because reasons, and then tried to pass the shitbucket to a subordinate. Not a good look.

Sure, there are scenarios where shit like this happens and then half of the diplomatic apparatus jumps in to swipe the whole thing under the rug. But the number of such scenarios which include a minister with a semi-relevant portfolio is precisely zero. That Emilija Stojmenova Duh did not realise this shows she politically tone-deaf as fuck.

But the depth of her political non-talent becomes fully transparent only when we take into account that the ultimate boss of the Slovenian diplomatic service is foreign minister Tanja Fajon. The very same person Emilija Stojmenova Duh flipped the proverbial finger to, when she quit SD for GS in order to win the ministerial appointment.

You can think what you want about the SD – and there are many thoughts to have about that party – but they were never likely to forget the embarrassment ESD caused them. Which is why the story leaked from the SD-led foreign ministry at the worst possible moment for her.

Because obviously none of this is a coincidence.

Golob’s Rule of Diminishing Support

Politically, Emilija Stojmenova Duh was damaged goods. It turned out that surviving her first no-confidence vote put her on probation rather than cleared her of all charges. And she failed to make proper amends.

More to the point, recent decisions by various watchdog agencies increased the possibility that ESD’s bad calls will start making PM Golob look bad as well. Not that he isn’t doing well in that department by himself, thank you very much.

Thus, the blue disco story was merely a shot across the bow, a warning of things to come if she didn’t see the (emergency) light and quit before things got really ugly. Which she ultimately did, only hours before the parliament would take her through the grinder.

And in lieu of a final thought, it would appear that a new rule is shaping in Slovenian politics. The moment the Big Bird public says he has someone’s back is the moment this person should start packing because their time is up.

Call it Golob’s Rule Of Diminishing Support.

Published by

pengovsky

Agent provocateur and an occasional scribe.