Parliamentary election in Muddy Hollows is scheduled for 22 March this year. This is the gist of a decree president Nataša Pirc Musar signed earlier today. The date is not a surprise as NPM said as much just before Christmas. But it does mean that as of today the game is officially afoot.
Both readers of course know that the game has actually been afoot at least since October. The only real casualty here is pengovsky’s slightly tongue-in-cheek projection of 8 March as election date. But for that to happen, a lot of things would have to fall in place. Including a pliant president. And we know how things are in that department.
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Electoral window
That is not to say that the decree is a non-event. Quite the opposite. It starts a clearly defined chain of events where every actor knows what their role is, what needs doing and when. This goes for the various electoral commissions, on state, regional and local levels. But for parties and candidates which can now start collecting signatures of support and filing paperwork.
Oh, and the Supreme Court now stands ready to quickly rule on any potential dispute regarding the entire process. Stick a pin into this one. This time around, the court might play an outsize role.
For about a year now, pengovsky was harping on about election being held on 8 March. Which, yeah… I mean, it would be cool if it really went down like that. Having a vote on the International Women’s Day would be awesome as fuck. But there was a glitch: 8 March is exactly one week too soon for regular election.
Seeing as the current parliament was sworn in on 13 May 2022, the electoral window includes Sundays from 15 March to 26 April. Theoretically 8 March would be doable if the PM were to resign and force an early election. But it would require a fuckton of procedural acrobatics. Not to mention a president who would play ball while the opposition screamed (not without justification) bloody murder.
Why 22 March actually makes sense
And given that at the moment the relationship between The Prez and The Apex Avian is only slightly north of the Khruschev – Mao split circa 1961, the 8 March gimmick just wasn’t on the cards.
With all of the above, 22 March as election day makes a lot of sense. Article 81 of the constitution reads that regular parliamentary election can not be held sooner than two months and no later than fifteen days before four years have passed from the inaugural session.
Now, technically the election doesn’t have to be on a Sunday. It can be any day of the week, provided it is a non-working day. Because, you know, it is cool if people don’t have to take a sick day to cast their vote, or stand in line on their lunch break, or some such silliness. You hear that, America? It’s not that hard, really.
But I digress. Seeing as Sundays appear regularly about once a week and that they have been a non-working day since before we started this universal suffrage thing about a century ago, Muddy Hollows has been holding its votes on Sundays since, like, forever.
But every presidential decree on parliamentary election also carries a certain degree of symbolism. It not simply about what the president does, it is also about how and when they do it. Even within clearly defined constitutional bounds.
It’s not just a date
For example, waiting until the last possible date might well come across as if the president is artificially lengthening the life-span of an unpopular government. Then again, calling the election soon after the window opens signals a sense of urgency. At the very least, it impresses that the president is eager to at least try and dispense with the current parliament and its government ASAP.
Case in point, in 2011, president Danilo Türk signed the electoral decree a minute after midnight on 21 October, and picked the earliest possible election date, 4 December that year. True, the situation was a bit different, as Muddy Hollows was in a state of acute political paralysis and everyone was eager to break the spell of PM Borut Pahor’s indecisiveness.
But the point here is that choices about dates and deadlines matter. Which is something NPM was looking for in choosing the date. Not too soon, because while they may have low opinion of one another, they are not mortal enemies. But also not too late, because the PM doesn’t really need any sort of political life-support.
First completed term in nearly two decades
He is about to wrap up a full term, which is the first time this has happened since Janez Janša’s first (2004 – 2008) government.
To be precise, this is the first time since Janša 1.0 government that a full term was completed technically. When Miro Cerar resigned in March 2018, he pushed the timetable up by only two weeks. Election that was originally planned for 10 June 2018 was held on 13 May. Which, for all intents and purposes, should count as a completed term. But legalistic pedants in this country said otherwise and they are technically correct.
Be that as it may, a quick look at the 2026 calendar shows that this time around the second part of the election window is basically off limits. Either the date would fall at the beginning of the May Day break (27 April to 2 May) or in the final stretch of the campaign would be held around Easter, which probably gives the heebie-jeebies to most political parties, albeit for different reasons.
The right wing can’t be harping about love, forgiveness and how Big J for dying for our sins during the day and then scream about woke Marxism, LBGT agenda and the great replacement on the evening news. The left-liberal bloc, on the other hand always gets nervous when the Church comes within a country mile of daily politics anyhow. That’s just the way it is.
Time to get their acts together
Thus president Pirc Musar had 15 and 22 March to choose from. But the former is the first possible date. And since she has yet to go fully nuclear on Robert Golob’s ass (plus, she might need him in a year’s time, when she’ll be running for a second term), 22 March it was.
The date is nice and clean, there are no major holidays around it and it satisfies the many different criteria about what an election in sorry little excuse for a country should and should not be like.
It also leaves the political parties with enough time to get their campaign acts together, and fuck knows most of them need that more than Donald Trump needs Venezuelan oil.
So it begins…
Which just happened to be the first “official” campaign issue. However the splits didn’t necessarily occur where we’d expect them to. But we’ll deal with that in one of the future posts. Because we will first have to take a look at Levica parliamentary group leader Matej T. Vatovec surprisingly decamping to greener (redder?) pastures of Social Democrats. Which also happened today. The game truly is afoot.
