It has been a week since the Slovenian election and Janez Janša keeps re-litigating the result. Apparently he skipped school when they were learning how nobody likes a sore loser. Or, he may be in more shit with rank and file than he lets on. Which is why he keeps kicking this particularly deceased horse.
On the other hand, Robert Golob and Nataša Pirc Musar are calling meetings. Right now, these are purely about taking the temperature. But in this brave new world of post-rational politics vibing is super important, apparently. So there are already attempts at making people comfortable around one another.
pengovsky keeps this blog ad- and subscription-free. Maybe it’s just a form or therapy. But he does run on coffee and the occasional cheese cracker. Which is a good combo in these times of energy crisis. But still, coffee needs to be had and maybe you can support pengovsky by chipping in for a cup or two by using this link.
Officially unofficial meetings
While Robert Golob held a get-to-know-one-another meetup last week, it was president Nataša Pirc Musar who kicked off the official proceedings yesterday, by meeting with leaders of all parliamentary parties and sounding them out.
pengovsky says “official proceedings”, even though the meetings were billed as unofficial. But between a day-long press stakeout in front of the presidential office, party leaders addressing a gaggle of reporters and the Prez herself then holding a press conference, there was little unofficial about the whole thing. Other than the Prez’s office limiting access to photojournalists and rubbing the journalists’ association the wrong way.
Then again, the meet-ups were indeed perfunctory and temperature-gauging. NPM said she didn’t learn a whole lot other than that it will take fucking ages to cobble together a coalition. Oh, and she also said that nobody likes a sore loser and that Janša should cut that result-disputing shit out. Not in as many words, but you get the picture.
Sore loser
Speaking of the Glorious Leader, seeing as the Party actually did well in the election, the man stopped short of disputing the overall result of the vote. For now, at least. But for the past nine days he kept finding new and ever more desperate ways to try and derail the confirmation of the result. So far, without much success. Yet, he is by no means done.
pengovsky spent the last couple of months harping on about how Janša and his minions are setting up information space to dispute the election result should it be close and they come up short. Obviously, none of that was a good-faith argument but rather a drive-thru for ready-made excuses, depending on the actual post-election needs.
These ranged from claims that rural voters were getting disenfranchised to claims of what amounts to stuffing ballot boxes. He also made up a veritable fuckton of administrative irregularities that in his mind make this whole thing illegitimate.
The one straw Janša and SDS might actually have grasped at (and it still is just a straw) is the location of early voting in Ljubljana, where one part of the electoral says the vote must be organised at local electoral committee HQ but another part basically says committees are free to organise however they like as long as people can cast their vote.
Throwing out the early vote
So the state electoral commission ruled that maybe things in the capital should be organised differently but that it wasn’t really a problem. This, of course, was enough for our audacious autocrat to demand that early election results in Ljubljana be thrown out, because… reasons.
But the move was as premeditated at is it was obvious. You see, even before the early voting started, Janša and SDS were firing off allegations about the impropriety of the early voting locations in Ljubljana and told their supporters to avoid early voting. Which the supporters dutifully did.
It was only after he made sure that few-to-none votes for SDS would be endangered, that Janša demanded early votes in Ljubljana be thrown out. Because disenfranchising rural voters (again, not a thing!) is super bad, but disenfranchising Ljubljana votes is fair game, apparently.
Not that it comes as a surprise to either reader, but this is just the latest example of ho Janez Janša doesn’t really give a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys about a fair election. He just wants 11,780 votes in Georgia to win. And he will probably continue to do so, up until and including the confirmation of MPs’ mandates.
Why is Janša doing this?
One might ask why the fuck is Janša doing this? He came within a hair’s breadth of winning the plurality and he still has a decent shot at becoming the PM. Again. All he needs it to keep his cool, and even if Golob manages to cobble together a coalition, Janša and SDS will still exert enormous influence in the new parliament.
The Glorious Leader does not operate like that. Not only does he need to win, he needs to project strength and humiliate the adversary. The goal is nothing short of total domination. Which is why his governments are very one-sided affairs, where coalition agreements are rarely worth the paper they’re printed on.
However, with total domination very much not being achieved, Janša has an ever bigger problem. With so many new voters in his camp (and why so many young people voted for SDS will be a subject of a future blogpost), Janša actually needs to reassert his cult-of-personality thing, to make sure these voters stay with him, despite the failure. The only way Janša knows to do that, is by conjuring up a conspiracy theory.
Golob cooing other parties
But while Janša spent the last seven days reasserting his cult of personality, Robert Golob was busy sweet-talking his potential coalition partners. He is making them the centre of his universe and is using verbiage he knows will resonate with them.
Development plan for NSi. Fight against corruption and tax breaks for Demokrati. Housing and welfare for Levica. Sovereignty for Resnica (*shrudder*). You know you want it for Social Democrats.
There are many similarities between Janša and Golob when it comes to doing politics. Some would even say too many . But there are also stark differences and this is one of them. These days, when the Big Bird speaks GS priorities are nowhere to be seen. At the same time, he is using verbiage designed to make other parties feel as important as possible. Talk about a sales pitch. At least it is much better than pengovsky soliciting coffee.
In fact, Golob is avoiding horsetrading, allegedly finding out if there’s enough common ground first. In effect, he is trying to make everyone involved comfortable around everyone else before he even starts making a play at a coalition.
Now, the Apex Avian does not have unlimited time to do so. The new parliament will meet for an inaugural session on 10 April. Ideally, it will elect the new Speaker in the same session.
Keeping the pressure on
But like objects in the side-mirror, 10 April is closer than it may appear today. Thus it is possible that the Speaker will be elected a couple of days later. Not just because things will be complicated on that front but also because Janša and SDS are almost certain to dispute at least some of the MPs being seated.
Just think about it. If the election was rigged, at least in part, as the Audacious Autocrat claims, then there must be at least a few MPs who really shouldn’t have been elected. Janša and his minions are almost certain to bring this up. If for nothing else, to keep the pressure on. And if they luck out and actually get to unseat an MP, all the better. It is probably not going to happen, but you never know.
Point being that the ad-hoc coalition electing the Speaker may or may not resemble the actual ruling coalition that Robert Golob will – eventually, probably – cobble together.
Ironically, the man helping him most in this endeavour is Janez Janša with his rants against the legitimacy of the election. Because nothing will drive the smaller parties into making a deal with Golob more than Janša constantly threatening to blow up the election result and force a repeat election. And once that possibility dawns on everyone, including Jernej Vrtovec of NSi, things will start falling in place.
Play hard with Golob or surrender to Janša
But for now, Jernej Vrtovec is playing hard to get and insists there’s no trust between his party and Golob. Which is weird, because other than a couple of half-hearted attempts at electoral reform, GS and NSi didn’t exactly do a lot of cooperating anyhow. But there is the small detail of Vrtovec being indicted for abuse of office over checking if the police are have wiretaps on specific people who just happened to be their political brethren. So maybe it’s personal for Vrtovec.
But NSi honcho behaves as if the is the only game in party-town (pun very much intended). Which he is most definitely not. In fact, what got elected to the parliament was not NSi but rather NSi++, where NSi won seven seats while SLS and Fokus won one seat each. Especially SLS is likely very keen to end up in the government. And the way things stand now, they have a better chance of achieving that with Golob than with Janša.
So, despite all the bravado, NSi++ is basically facing the same conundrum as Anže Logar and Demokrati. Either they play hard but ultimately negotiate with Golob, or surrender to Janša in advance and hope the Glorious Leader hands out enough candy to make everyone happy.
The only difference is that unlike Vrtovec who at the very least will at least keep his cushy MP job, Logar doesn’t even have that so he really, really needs a coalition deal. Preferably one which he can negotiate from at least somewhat of an independent position.
Logar’s Haily Mary pass
That said, Logar is not above a little dirty trickery himself. Namely, just as SDS was disputing results in at least 40 voting precincts, Demokrati were alleging irregularities, too. Specifically in the Maribor area and “other places which may have cost them a seat in the parliament”.
Obviously, everyone understood this to be a Hail Mary pass for Anže Logar to somehow clinch that MP seat that he missed by 30-something votes. But just as with SDS , the DVK told Demokrati where exactly the can shove their complaints.
Turns out you can take a man out of the SDS, but you can’t take SDS out of a man.
