If your idea of Santa Claus is a bald guy with a thick Dolenjska drawl who has it in for public media and NGOs, then Christmas is about to come early in Muddy Hollows. Namely, despite claiming the opposite, Janez Janša is on the cusp or forming his fourth government.
That much is obvious after president Pirc Musar held her first official round of consultations before she appointing a PM nominee. To be fair, no-one has yet secured the 46 votes necessary in the first and second rounds of PM appointment procedure. But with Robert Golob taking a step back, the initiative is with the Glorious Leader. And he sure behaves as if he had already clinched it.
Pengovsky still writes this blog for free, whenever he can. Sometimes he’s too slow. For sure. And needs to be proofread. For sure. But is predictable, sweary, and is largely underpriced by the market. So this blog can, you know, continue to be a good place, if you can maybe buy this blogger a coffee. For sure.
Two-and-half steps of nomination
As readers with an unhealthy obsession with Slovenian political system know, appointing the PM candidate is a two-to-three-step procedure, with the third step kicking in only if the first two fail. The entire thing is designed in a way that all but ensures a PM-designate gets elected. Unless there is some sort of a political consensus not to do so (see below).
In short, the president gets first dibs. Per Article 111 of the Constitution, she has thirty days from inauguration of the new parliament to make her nomination. If that doesn’t fly, parliamentary groups, or any group (gaggle? congregation? murder?) of ten or more MPs can join in on the fray and put forward their nominee within the next fourteen days.
Should that result in competing candidates, they get voted on in the order in which they were nominated. But if the president wants to give it another go for whatever reason, her candidate goes to the front of the line. And whichever candidate gets to the magic number (46 votes) first, gets to be the PM-designate and everyone else can go cry into a pillow.
However, if no candidate makes the cut after the second attempt, the bar gets lowered and suddenly a simple majority suffices. This effectively means a minority government (even though appointing the cabinet is a separate process).
But there’s a twist.
The case for/against snap election in mid-July
First, the parliament needs to vote – within 48 hours of the last failed vote – on whether it wants the torture to continue into round three. That, too, requires a simple majority and at this point, the ball would be entirely in the court of GS and SDS, simultaneously.
Namely, if both largest parties agreed (even if for competing reasons) that a re-run of elections would be worth the risk, they could join hands in an unholy ad-hoc coalition and force the dissolution of the parliament. This would result in a snap election some time in mid-July and both GS and SDS could arguably count on sucking up what little oxygen they left for other parties to breathe.
But while GS, SD and Levica could count on the 6% of the broadly left-wing vote that was lost to parties below the 4% threshold (not to mention the mostly-GS disenchanted voters who stayed at home), SDS has can only cannibalize NSi++ and Anže Logar’s Demokrati. Of course, Janša would be perfectly fine with that. Logar and Jernej Vrtovec, however, not so much. Not to mention SLS and Fokus, the ++ parts of NSi++. They would be livid.
And that’s before we get to the fact Zoran Stevanović would probably have to turn in his Speaker’s gavel. It is possible that in a snap vote Resnica wet get kicked out of the parliament, mostly due to Slovenia’s answer to RFK, jr., behaving like a giant asshole from the moment he was sworn in to the post.
Everyone’s a fucking liar
Point being that if we get to the third phase by any chance, all bets are off and chances of a Golob premiership, a Janša premiership and a snap election would be roughly the same. Perhaps with a slight edge in favour of the Big Bird clinching the vote, simply because by then he would start looking like the lesser of to evils for most of the smaller players.
Which is precisely the reason Janez Janša will do everything in his power to not let it come to that.
If there is one common descriptor of the last couple of weeks, is that everyone if fucking lying through their teeth. Pengovsky isn’t talking ordinary levels of politicians making stuff up and then pretending otherwise here. No, what we’re seeing here are ninja levels of misinformation and deception, where the prudent thing is to assume exactly the opposite of what is being said.
That is to say, that when Apex Avian says that he is fine with spending time in opposition, he is in fact anything but. And when GS parliamentary group chief and soon-to-be-ex minister of defence Borut Sajovic says the party refused to resort to treachery and treason to secure a majority, you can be damn sure they were playing dirty pool to the fucking max. It just didn’t work.
Papacy, the Normans and Comrade Tito
And the reason it didn’t work is that despite claiming the opposite, Janez Janša is very much ready to form whatever weak coalition he can get his hands on. Furthermore, his statement after meeting president NPM on Monday, that SDS is not putting together a government actually means that The Party is very much putting together a government. In fact, said government has most likely taken shape already.
What the Glorious Leader is looking for right now is not so much support from equal partners but rather an act of fealty from the very people his power hinges on. Think less papacy and more Norman kings of England.
(Yes, pengovsky is a big fan of The British History Podcast, why do you ask?)
At any rate, as long as Janez Janša is pretending he doesn’t have the 46 votes, with or without anti-waxx Resnica entering a confidence-and-supply arrangement, president Pirc Musar can hold off making her nomination. But she needs to make her move by 10 May, one way or another. Meaning that Marshal Twito could lead this country once more no later than May 25th.
If you know, you know.
