Slowly at first and then all at once. Parliamentary election in Muddy Hollows is less than 72 hours away and the shit-show went from zero to 11, inside a New York minute. For all the polls and TV debates, it now open warfare and a general melee.
The last six to twelve months have provided us with plenty of rendering of garments, strategizing and positioning to maintain status quo. SDS was in the lead, GS second, then nothing for a very long time, and then everyone else. But the moment ball started rolling, it was all just, well, one battle after another.
Pengovsky writes this drivel for free and runs on coffee. If you like what you read on this here blog, please consider buying him a coffee using this link. And if you already did, you rock!
Anže Logar vs. Vladimir Prebilič
For almost a year, public opinion polls have been as interesting as Pete Hegseth during Dry January. And until about two weeks ago, things were pretty much clear. SDS was in the lead, with GS following, just outside the margin of error. Then nothing, for a really long time and then everyone else within a 3%-interval, hovering between 4 and 7 percent.
But there were signs of things bubbling, just beneath the surface. First and foremost, there was the self-immolation of Vladimir Prebilič. Sure, he misread the room and somehow thought that just by appearing on the scene, the seas will part and the liberal and left blocs will welcome him with open arms. And when that didn’t happen, he careened from a campaign fuck-up to a campaign fuck-up, all but crashing out of the race.
The series of unfortunate events that was the Prebilič campaign made life easier for the former SDS choir-boy-turned-apostate Anže Logar. His Democrats. By Anže Logar (seriously, that’s how the party’s name is styled. Complete mindfuck, if you ask pengovsky) ran a relatively slick campaign and somewhat benefited from Prebilič’s crash-out. Apparently it pays to be the first to present an election alternative, even if it took you fucking ages to take the plunge.
Muscle memory
But the more the campaign dragged on, the more Logar’s impersonation of Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks started fading away. And even if his attempt at breaking away from Janez Janša is earnest (and pengovsky still believes this to be the case), his muscle memory started taking over and the Anže Logar we all know and, uh, love reappeared. Still with a charisma of a wet cloth, but also thoroughly unlikable.
It remains to be seen whether Logar’s tanking in the polls is the result of his mask starting to slip or the other way around. But fact of the matter is that after once movement began, Logar’s ratings took a turn for the worse. Likely, because many of his supporters started drifting back to the Party, for fear of things going tits-up more than they already are.
Because Logar is not the only one with a muscle memory problem. Predictably, Janez Janša simply couldn’t resist and fucked it all up virtually at the last moment. As per usual.
And by “fucked it up”, pengovsky means that Janša seems to have, once again, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Dismay and Disappointment
Make no mistake, SDS is still poised to come up with an impressive election result this Sunday. But they are no longer a shoo-in for the top spot.
In fact, after the corruption videos/Israeli election interference thing blew up, poll after poll has recorded a sharp bump for PM Golob and his Gibanje Svoboda, much to the dismay and disappointment of the Glorious Leader and his minions. This suggests was a substantial voter activation on the liberal left side and perhaps even some undecideds, regardless of the corruption allegations.
Turns out people don’t like the idea of foreign powers meddling in national politics. Especially if this is done at the behest of one of the domestic political parties. And even more so if said party is professing all sorts of nationalist and jingoistic shit, while using Israeli spooks, (formerly) Hungary-funded media, Bosnian-laundered money and American-MAGA playbook, while singing Croatian fascist tunes.
There used to be a word for this sort of politics, but it wasn’t used in polite society outside of a classroom.
So, what the fuck happened?
There will be time for a fuller analysis after the election. But right now it seems that pengovsky was right (duh!) when he wrote that parties were keeping their powder dry for as long as possible.
Golob should thank Netanyahu
The thing that started this domino effect was, ironically, US-Israeli attack on Iran which prompted a scramble to evacuate tourists from the region. The Apex Avian and his government actually made a decent job of it and got most Slovenians out while other countries were still trying to charter planes.
This started moving polls in their direction, which in turn prompted the SDS to spring their trap. But once that was done, Newton’s Third Law kicked in once again. And when faced with the allegation that he met with Mossad-for-hire, Marshal Twito did what he always does. He started lying through his teeth, but still managed to get caught with his dick in his hand.
He went from “I don’t know who these people are” via “I may have met one of them once, somewhere outside Slovenia” to “yeah, I met with one of them, but I don’t know when, I just know it wasn’t on the date the report says I did“, all inside of 24 hours. Who knows what the story will be come tomorrow evening.
Janša is a shockingly bad liar
While we’re on the issue, it is remarkable just how shockingly bad a liar Janez Janša is. I mean sure, it’s good to tell the truth. But if you’re gonna do it anyway (and most politicians are good in truth-bending department), at least try to stick with the story for more than a couple of hours.
He tried something similar when he was caught with his hand inside the cookie jar back before the 2018 election, with that Bosnian money-laundering thing. He ran through every possible iteration of the story, trying to blame literally everyone else, only to finally admit the wrongdoing and return the money. As pengovsky wrote back then, Janez Janša was once SDS’s biggest asset. Now he is the Party’s biggest liability.
Oh, since you asked, yes, something like this happened in 1988 as well. Back then the Yugoslav army arrested him over possession of a classified document and was desperate to find out whom he got the document from and whom else did he show it.
And poor naive little Janša fell for the oldest trick in the book, when the interrogator said that the army already knows everything and just needs to hear it from him, so he’s not the one unfairly hung out to dry. The future triple prime minister then proceeded to tell everything, while munching on an ice-cream cone the nice interrogator provided.
Some people never learn, huh?
Raising a stink in Brussels
Anyway, here in 2026, Robert Golob, probably made the best possible move of the entire campaign and took himself out of the equation for a couple of days. The SDS-Black Cube connection was first leaked to the media who teamed up with NGOs to write a banger of a story. The Big Bird then professed his shock but let other people take point on the issue, while he skedaddled off to Brussels and raised hell about foreign election interference in an EU member state.
Probably wary of the blowback they got in Romania, the EU was bit more muted in its response. Sure, Golob got some decent press out of it, but it was only Emanuel Macron who openly went to bat for his liberal comrade in charms.
Perhaps it was fact that unlike in Romania, the security apparatus in this sorry little excuse for a country seems to be on top of things. Or, even more importantly, that in Muddy Hollows, Janša is the one likely to dispute results and nobody really wants to go there.
Stop the steal
Nobody except the Glorious Leader, should the election result end up being reasonably close and not in his favour. In this case, expect hysterical claims about disenfranchising rural areas and, at the same time conspiracy theories about “secret voter rolls, deployed to skew the result”. This is Stop the Steal territory. Both narratives are already out there, simmering and waiting to be launched into the mainstream. Pengovsky wrote elsewhere on both.
And, of course there’s already good old misinformation floating around. So far it is pretty amateurish, to the point that she state electoral commission (DVK) is able to debunk it easily. But Sunday is still a long way down, and things can change quickly. That goes for public opinion polls, too.
But for now, it looks like GS actually managed to hit a 30% threshold among likely voters, with SDS trailing in second place with 26%. That is quite the turnaround.
Levica/Vesna and NSi+SLS+Focus are north of 8 percent. This is great news for Luka Mesec because that would mean his party would double it’s MP count, and mid news for Jernej Vrtovec whose party would add one MP. Maybe.
Not great not terrible
Then it’s SD and Matjaž Han, with 7.5%, a decidedly not-great-not-terrible territory. And then, everyone else, including Anže Logar, dangerously close to the 4% threshold.
This, of course is a major shift from where polls were, say, two months ago, when things looked set in stone, with SDS in the lead GS close second and a dead heat in coalition forming.
The latter is still very much in the air. But a simple repeat of the current coalition setup is not impossible anymore. Which makes a lot of people very nervous, be it because they have so much to gain, or because they have so much to lose.
Mind you, there are other polls out there as well. And if while they were all mostly in agreement about as little as a month ago, this is no longer the case. Which is precisely why the last few days of the 2026 parliamentary election campaign in Muddy Hollows look more like a bar-fight than a carefully executed plan.
In any event, it’s a bit like one battle after another. But someone will have to pick up the tab at the end.
