Miha Jazbinšek died two weeks ago, at the age of 85. Both readers of this blog probably don’t know (much) about him but pengovsky would be remiss if didn’t write this one up. Sure, he was one of the OG democratically elected ministers in Muddy Hollows. He was also one of the handful of Slovenian politicos to have a law named after themselves. But after exiting the natioanl stage, he had a long, loud and lonely career in Ljubljana city council where this blogger covered him for more than a decade.
There Jazbinšek seemingly felt most at home with his particular breed of obstinate progressive liberalism. And if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, congratulations, you’ve just met Jazzby. He drove successive mayors including Zoran Janković up the wall with his relentless debates, pointed criticism and – at least once – disagreeing with what he said minutes ago and asking for procedural time to rebut his own debate.
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The law bearing his name
Miha Jazbinšek entered Muddy Hollows lore by ways of a massive housing overhaul which became known as the Jazbinšek Law. What it basically did was to distribute the existing public housing fund among the people, based on a relatively complex system of points, weights and discounts.
You see, in the old country, most housing was public. The municipality would approve a project by a quasi-public developer, with seed money coming from employees’ mutual funds. Like pensions and health insurance, everyone was required to put away a tiny portion of their paycheck into such funds.
Most of the money, however, was provided by various companies, who also ran their own housing funds. And when all of this money was pooled, entire neighbourhoods were built in a relatively short amount of time, mostly between 1970 and 1985.
Seeing as most property was public back then, people didn’t outright own the apartment. But they did have dwelling/apartment rights and through that they could use public apartments as if they owned them. Up to and including passing them on as inheritance. But – to use a market economy term – they could not leverage them as an asset.
This new thing called capitalism
Jazbinšek Law changed all that. At its core, it was a massive redistribution of wealth. And a massively successful one at that. In one fell swoop, the legislation created an economic and financial foundation for an entire generation of Slovenians. Not unlike vouchers in privatising the public-owned companies, only unlike with the stocks, the people did not, for the most part, unload their newfound property for peanuts.
But understanding capitalism only went so far. In fact, the moment people got their ownership papers, most of them lost any interest in, you know, managing their assets. And with people pengovsky also means politicians.
Originally, Jazbinšek Law was meant to be only the first step in disbursing among the people what in the old country was theoretically of the people (in a very socialist amorphous sense of the word). This was to be followed by divvying up of the functional land surrounding the newly privatised housing as well as replenishing of the housing stock, now via state and municipal housing funds.
Not following through
While some efforts were made in that direction, they were not on the scale of the original law. And as focus of national politics shifted towards bigger issues (ahem, EU and NATO), the little details didn’t matter as much anymore.
Needless to say that thirty years later, a national housing shortage in Muddy Hollows is as bad as anywhere in Europe. With prices to match. Even more ironically, a clunky attempt by Ljubljana mayor Zoran Janković to sort-of-solve a city-wide parking clusterfuck, which is a direct result of lack of follow-up on Jazbinšek legislation, threatens to bring down Zoki’s 20-year tenure as mayor.
Incidentally, if this were actually come to pass (more on that in a future post), this would be Jazzby running interference against Janković even from beyond the grave. Which would be fucking hilarious.
You see, Miha Jazbinšek and Zoran Janković never really got along. Jazzby saw himself as occupying a cross-section between urbanism, sociology and nature protection. In a way, he was years, if not decades, before his time. One could go through his website and find policy nuggets and ideas from late nineties and early naughts that sound suspiciously like EU’s Green New Deal.
Always the Lone ranger
But for someone whose primary field of activity was politics, he was woefully inept at building coalitions. He just could not understand that being right was never enough and that sometimes people will agree with him and still vote to defy him. More precisely, he understood this, but he never saw it as an obstacle to work around. To him, it was merely proof of other people’s ineptitude.
This was also his take on the fact that the Green movement in Muddy Hollows split early in the nineties. Despite the fact that he was by far the most prominent member of the OG Green Party in Slovenia, back then somehow the provincial right-wing element took control of the outfit and made it a family heirloom. All Jazbinšek got out of this was the ability to run on the party ticket if he wanted to and keep his operational an political independence.
As a result, he was often the lone voice of what he saw as rational dissent in the Ljubljana City Council. And not infrequently, rational would be doing a lot of heavy lifting in those debates. These were legendary. In fact, Jazzby and another one-man-band in City Council, Mihael Jarc (a crusader from the opposite side of the political spectrum and proof that no-good people live longer) were the primary reasons mayor Janković had no problem finding the necessary two-thirds majority to change the rules and limit debate time, soon after he took office.
Old habits die hard
After that, Miha Jazbinšek’s influence and ability to gum up the works were considerably weakened. As a direct consequence, he would transfer the bulk of his screeds to press releases. These, he sent out with the conviction of a 20-something die-hard activist rather than a seasoned politician who has been around the block a couple of times.
But in a proof that old habits die hard, Jazbinšek (born in 1941, just a few months after Nazi Germany invaded and subjugated then-kingdom of Yugoslavia) remained convinced that paper is a rare commodity, even in the digital age. To wit, he regularly sent out Word documents with margins extended all the way into the bleeding edge of the page, often making them impossible to print out. Because you know, we gotta conserve paper.
He also insisted that every document he sent out would include his personal signature. As if the the reader (mostly journalists and other people paid to read these things) could ever confuse his generalist style of prose, interspersed with random focuses (foci?) onto very granular and often helpful detail, with anyone else’s writings. But everyone who had to, read those things. Because sometimes, just sometimes, there would be a nugget in there that could make a newsroom’s week in an instant.
Jazzby
The one thing that Miha Jazbinšek took great pride in, other than driving mayor Janković and his predecessor Danica Simšič up against the wall, was music. He would perform at regular (albeit rare) intervals with his band, Miha Jazbinšek and His Legends.
To a certain part of the public, his musical exploits in the jazz-swing genre were much better known than his political achievements. It was also the arena where he earned a nickname that would follow him into politics. Jazbinšek might have been a bit weird and often went against the grain intentionally, but he never lacked recognition. Being affectionately known as Jazzby made sure of that.
As fates would have it, Miha Jazbinšek passed on 25 June, the birthday of the country the future of which he has affected profoundly. Even if his area was not flashy statecraft and flag-waving. And yet, thirty-odd years after his foray into national politics, we are seeing that issues he argued for passionately, if sometimes brusquely, are now seen as key issues of resilience and sovereignty.
Like swing, these things apparently never really go out of fashion.
