Almost two weeks ago, president Nataša Pirc Musar was involved in a car crash while travelling in a motorcade. She suffered a broken collarbone while one of the other two passengers suffered a more serious injury.
The driver/bodyguard in the president’s van was also slightly injured and apparently there was a non-insignificant amount of material damage. Also not-insignificantly damaged was the notion of at least semi-competent official communication at the highest levels of the state. And much of the blame lies with the president herself.
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Has no-one seen Quantum of Solace?
There is a persistent notion at the top echelons of Slovenian politics that a high government office must come with much pomp and circumstance, until a big kahuna desires for some low-key r’n’r. At that moment, said kahuna expects to be treated like a private citizen, aghast that the media and the public would want to know anything. Or, to put it in the words of president Pirc Musar, “I can’t even get ice-cream like a normal person“.
It will come as a surprise to exactly no-one (other than maybe the president herself) that at her level, things don’t work like that. Like, the president was in a car crash. In a fucking tunnel. And yet, president Pirc Musar and her office wanted the whole thing treated as if it was a normal Friday afternoon in a traffic jam. Has no-one seen Quantum of Solace?
The communications car crash following the actual car crash began almost instantly. First, the fact that it took almost 18 hours to notify the public, even though NPM was scheduled to appear at a public event on the evening of the crash.
After the public was notified, by midday the next day, her office was suspiciously blasé about it. You know, the president had car whoopsie. She now has a boo-boo. Another person in the car had a bit larger boo boo. Shit happens. Big thanks to the first responders. And now, here’s the latest traffic and weather information.
Always fasten your seat-belt. And no cheating.
Excuse me? The head of an EU member state was in a car crash in a tunnel, where she sustained physical injuries, and the whole thing was under wraps for more than half a day? And then we’re just suppose to believe there’s nothing to see here? Clearly, these people don’t browse the internet a whole lot.
But of course things got much worse. Outside of the official communication, the media was told that president Pirc Musar was wearing her seat-belt. Only she didn’t. And this is the precise moment when things really went off the rails.
First it was the seat-belt revelation. Then NPM’s office wouldn’t share the names of the people travelling with her. The media found out one of them was a Russian citizen, forcing the president to come clean and to explain that both passengers were her long-time friends. One of them was NPM’s bowling teammate and a business associate who holds double Slovenian/Russian citizenship.
All of this was quite literally the case of a cover up being worse than the crime. Even though there was no crime to speak of in the first place.
Civilians hitching a ride in a motorcade
But there were questions about civilians hitching a ride in the presidential motorcade. Specifically whether the president can ferry around private citizens and at what cost. Contrary to their curtness about the crash itself, the president’s office went to great lengths to explain that everything was above board and that the president broke no rules in that regard.
Not that everyone was happy with that because something something wasteful spending, security breaches and such. And while Team Pirc Musar may have the right of it (at the very least, there probably isn’t a current or former Slovenian politician who could throw the first stone in that regard), the question is not irrelevant.
Take a look at the American example. Whenever he is not smuggled off in a food container to a backup plane, the US president obviously rides the Air Force One with fill security, government and press entourage. Occasionally, a civilian might hitch a ride as well. But other than government employees, everyone onboard pays for their cost of travel. Not actual cost travel aboard AF1, but an equivalent price that one would pay to a commercial carrier. And that includes food.
After the whole thing went tits-up, the president did manage to fire off a sympathy-seeking Facebook post (see below) where she complained that she can’t really get any time with her friends. So she was hoping to get some quality time with her amigas while they were all going to go to a Matej Pogačar event in Komenda. She also added that she didn’t break any laws in that regard.
Reimbursing the government
Which, fair. But that doesn’t automatically disallow the question. Because at the end of the day, president’s friends did get a freebie for a leisurely activity at the taxpayers’ expense.
Is this a big problem? Not by itself. It is a problem than become huge if mishandled? Fuck yeah.
So, as a sidequest, pengovsky would humbly submit the Muddy Hollows version of civilian travel on Air Force One: just like the government reimburses its employees if they travel for work under their own steam, so too should civilians or their organisations reimburse the government if they hitch a ride on official transportation.
The tools for these calculations are readily available and who these not pocket-crippling amounts. In the case of the president’s friends, the total mileage reimbursement for one way travel from Umag, Croatia (where the they were all catching some r’n’r) to Komenda, Slovenia would be about 65 EUR per person. If the president were feeling super-generous, she could even chalk it up to her next paycheck. As things stand, however, they just left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.
Hints of impeachment
At any rate, by this point – and thanks to some carefully planted thoughts and some less than carefully executed journalism – it seemed that NPM was starring down the barrel of an impeachment investigation.
Remember how pengovsky wrote that following her jumping the gun on PM nomination, president Pirc Musar has opened herself to claims of breaching of the constitution. And how this blogger added that while it beggars belief that she’d be impeached just because she was impatient while reading the calendar, there could be other breaches in the future that could make for a nice impeachment package?
Turns out this was nearly one those. Because if you take keeping the public in the dark, ferrying civilians around on the taxpayers’ dime (see below) and a Russian citizen in the presidential vehicle at a time when the EU is (to put it very gently) in an very adversarial relationship with Russia, and add to that her earlier constitutional slip-up, you could – with some heavy spinning – turn this into a parliamentary challenge of her presidency.
And lo-behold, RTV SLO did some overzealous reporting last week and claimed that former judge at the constitutional court and former interior minister in Janša’s first goverment Peter Jambrek was doing just that.
But while the public broadcaster stands by its reporting. Jambrek denied drafting the impeachment document. Instead, he said, he was thinking out loud whether all of this amounts to the Muddy Hollows of high crimes and misdemeanours. And let’s not forget that it would take only an absolute majority in the parliament to impeach NPM and refer the matter to the constitutional court.
A shot across the bow before the re-election campaign
To be fair, the impeachment angle seems to be a non-starter. But if you think this was just shoddy reporting, then pengovsky has some prime Florida swampland to sell you.
Jambrek’s impeachment musings were clearly a shot across NPM’s bow and a hint of things to come. Nataša Pirc Musar is up for reelection in a little over a year and arguably anything she does from this point onward can and should be considered a campaign move.
This blogger would even venture to say many of her staring contests with Robert Golob were campaign moves as well. But all that work went down the shitter when Marshal Twito rode back to power. Best laid plans of mice and men, amirite?
President Pirc Musar micromanaging her way into a disaster
Pengovsky opined at the beginning that much the blame for her current predicament lies with the president herself. Obviously, some of this is because the buck stops with her. But some of this is that she is a notorious micromanager and it is highly improbable that her comms team would take steps (especially as awkward as these) without clearing things with her first.
So it is entirely plausible that much of the communications evasion and trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube was done under her direction or at least with her approval. And that’s always a lost cause from the get-go.
At any rate, after almost two weeks of being dragged through the mud, the president finally managed to cobble together a personal response. Specifically, she wrote a Facebook post where she framed herself as a victim of character assassination, with her friends and family little more than collateral damage.
Finally opting to present a more human side of herself in this clusterfuck, she appealed to people’s sense of dignity and empathy and signed the post simply as Nataša. After a fortnight of omnishambles which included NPM releasing her medical release form for no discernible reason, the FB post thing was quite refreshing.
Out of the woods, but not quite
And it seems to have done the trick. At the very least, the public’s attention was (temporarily?) diverted by Speaker Zoran Stevanović, who a week ago gleefully added that we needn’t worry because if NPM gets canned here’s ready to take over.
Well, Muscles For Brain is not even close to being ready to take over in like, ever. Especially after his Resnica party happily announced they are courting the Russian parliament to get invited to Moscow. Get it? This is not the Duma is desperately seeking friendly voices in the EU. I mean, they are, but in this case, Stevo and his Truthers are the ones begging for a VIP pass to the Kremlin. Twats.
But more on that in a near-future post. For now, Nataša Pirc Musar seems to have weathered a particularly wild storm. But the event has made her and her team look unpleasantly nonchalant, somewhat entitled and very much shit at reading the room.
One-term presidency (the ghost of Danilo Türk’s past)
Veterans of Muddy Hollows politics (or at least avid readers of this blog) will remember how former president Danilo Türk and his team were also taken aback when various nothingburger allegations were levelled against Big D and how they struggled to even take them seriously.
But by the time they did, the stories were already blown way out of proportion and Türk’s office was trying to put the genie back into the bottle. But as a rule, they only manage to over-correct, thereby making it appear they, too, take the matter very seriously and giving the story much more of a leg to stand on.
Rinse and repeat a couple of times and you got yourself a one-term president. Which is something that could well happen to NPM as well, if she is not careful over the next 15 months.
