After numerous criminal investigations, parliamentary hearings and more or less organised attempts to form a viable political alternative, it would be more than a little ironic if the person who did the most to oust Zoran Janković as Ljubljana mayor turned out to be… Zoran Janković.
The impressive student protest movement is proving to be the greatest challenge the regime of Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, As a result, predsedniče Aca is looking for support wherever he can find it. And as if on cue, Zoki sent a fawning letter of support to the embattled Serbian leader. This irked so many people that the seemingly forever-mayor may not actually be forever much longer. Slight panic ensued.
In the letter, apparently sent on a City of Ljubljana stationery, Janković praised Vučić’s leadership. And while he paid lip service to the students’ right to protest, he opined they should be doing more productive things, like studying. He then proceeded to wax poetic about just how good Aca is for Serbia and that he is pretty much the only thing standing between the country and a fiery abyss of hell. Or something.
Reader, it did not go over well.
The outrage was as swift as it was brutal, coming mostly from left-liberal circles, one of Zoki’s core constituencies in the city. Which is bad enough, given that the predominantly left-leaning Ljubljana voters were at least willing to contend with Janković, absent a viable alternative.
Milan Kučan enters chat
It also didn’t help that most of the Slovenian political class was until now suspiciously muted in their reactions to Serbian student protests, leading people to ask what the fuck is wrong with Muddy Hollows politicos.
(short answer: the left sees Aca as a guy they can do business with, whereas the right sees him as an illiberal fellow traveler, they can do business with.)
But what sent mayor Zoki into slight panic for real, was direct and overt criticism by his role-model and political mentor, Milan Kučan. The former prez went on the record saying the letter was Janković’s biggest political blunder.
Which is saying something given that until now Kučan maintaned Zoki’s biggest fuck-up was failure to form a government following his 2011 electoral victory. And so, in a clear case of damage control, Zoran Janković went on national TV for a couple of live interviews the other day.
The mayor is notoriously bad at playing defence. He sees himself as a shark and a shark always moves forward. But even so, the man did a spectacularly piss-poor job of it.
He kept changing the subject, tried to project confidence which came across as utterly tone-deaf, and at no point was even willing to concede that he may have misread the room. And when the veteran TV anchor Bergant would have none of it, Janković even tried his time-tested move of invoking his mixed-ethnicity background. As if he is being ostricised for being part-Serbian himself.
Lack of talent
Which might have worked back in 2006 when the SDS went full nationalistic on his ass. But it sure as hell doesn’t work in 2025, when the man has almost-unchecked power in the city. Especially not when uses that power to support the very same thing he himself railed against and won landslide elections on that same ticket, over and over again.
On display over the last couple of weeks was the fact that Zoran Janković does not posses much of a political acumen. The letter was completely unnecessary and even if it is true – as some contend – that he sent it to protect his alleged business interests in Vučić-controlled construction projects in Belgrade, he did much more harm than good. Even to himself, let alone the city he runs, for better of for worse, for the last two decades.
Milan Kučan was right. The letter is Janković’s biggest political blunder to date. First, because unlike his PM bid, this was a completely unforced error (one could argue that he was outmaneuvered after 2011 election).
And second, because he is now endangering his own powerbase. When he didn’t get the PM job in 2011, he staged an easy comeback to the City Hall a couple of months later. But is he gets kicked out of the City Hall, it’s curtains for him
A great act of terrible self-harm, indeed.
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