Category: Ljubljana

If You Build It They Will Come (redux)

It has been nearly three years since this post and over two years since construction of the new Stožice football stadium and sports hall began. Yesterday we saw the first results




The (unofficially named) Arena Stožice is a thing of beauty. While 12,500 seats may not be all that much compared to other, more renowned halls out there, it can be safely said that there is not a bad seat in the house. Acoustics are awesome and the whole thing does indeed look beautiful. Both from the inside as well as outside.

Not everything went according to plan. The final permit for issued only this morning and Bob knows what would happen if the stadium and the Arena wouldn’t have been ship-shape. But truth be told, no one really doubted that the permit would be issued. After all, certain parts of the current government and civil service are bending over backwards to accommodate him. But then again, there wasn’t a project like this in Ljubljana since 1982 and it is probably right and proper that the civil service is slightly more expedient than usual.



But the final permit turned out to be the least of Janković’s worries. Just as the final deadline was looming, one of the subcontractors flipped because he was owed a serious amount of money by Grep (the principal contractor) and as a result threatened to block the entire complex by parking trucks and heavy machinery around it. The whole thing even went so far that the ministry of transport closed the northern Ljubljana ring road for heavy trucks citing safety concerns, but in reality preventing the truckers’ protest. But since there were some eighteen trucks already parked in front of the Arena, the whole thing could have turned into a real mess.

Luckily it didn’t. The principal contractor and another subcontractor found a solution to satisfy the unhappy subcontractor, the machinery was removed and four hours later Slovenia played Spain in a basketball friendly and lost 72 to 79.



Today Slovenia plays Australia in a football friendly. Photos will be forthcoming tomorrow 🙂


P.S.: Yes, this undoubtedly was a part of Janković’s re-election campaign. But we’ll deal with that in due course.

Elections of 42

If you google terms Pavle Gantar and Douglas Adams together, you get zero relevant results. And yet it looks like president of the parliament is a huge fan of the man who gave us that wholly remarkable book with the words “Don’t panic!” written on its cover in nice, friendly letters. If that is not the case, than the probability factor of him calling local elections exactly on 42 (or, if you like on 10/10/10) are exactly two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-and-nine to one against. Well, in reality, the probability factor is slightly higher, but you get the point.

Here’s what the Guide has to say about elections:

A unique process, that exists mostly in so-called “Democratic” countries, in which several different idiots try to convince the general population of a country to put a little piece of paper with a particular idiot’s name on it into an envelope, and then stick the envelope into a big wooden box (in some countries this process has been replaced by clicking their name in a computer). Sounds silly? It will sound even sillier when you realize that this is the form of ruling in these countries. That is, instead of doing something sensible, like getting all the potential leaders into a room and having them throw mud at each other to decide who wins, they do it this way. An even more unsual factor than the elections themselves is the election “campaign”. This is where all the various idiots (a.k.a politicians) make nice colorful posters and TV commercials with catchy tunes to convince you to “vote” (put the envelope with their name in it into the wooden box) for them, or not to vote for others. In “non-democratic” countries, the process is made simpler by the fact that all the notes have only one name on them.

If anything, the above goes especially for Slovenian local elections. No wonder that the guide supplanted the Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge 🙂

But OK, enough fooling around. Yes, the president of the parliament called this year’s municipal elections on 10 October. At the moment Slovenia has 210 municipalities which means 210 mayoral and council elections. Pengovsky will leave it to you to decide on the absurdity of the situation of having one mayor per 9500 citizens and will instead focus on the most interesting part of the race: local elections in the capital Ljubljana.


President of the parliament Gantar sets election date (source: The Firm™)

Here, the situation is intriguing to say the least. Incumbent mayor Zoran Janković announced as early as December 2009 that he will seek re-election and ever since most of city political parties were preoccupied with deciding whom to run against Janković or whether to enter the mayoral race altogether.

Seven months later there are only four confirmed candidates. Janković himself, Mojca Kucler Dolinar of Christian-democratic Nova Slovenija, Meta Vesel Valentičič of DeSUS (the pensioner’s party) and Miha Jazbinšek, the lone rider of city politics, who will officially run on the Green party ticket, but is considered to be an institution unto himself. Additionally, the Liberal democrats (LDS) have apparently decided against running with their own man (or woman) and will support Janković for mayor instead. Reportedly, Zares are leaning towards that same move, although there’s no official word on it yet.

This basically leaves the Ljubljana branches of Borut Pahor’s Social democrats and Janez Janša’s SDS to pick their candidates. And this is where the fun starts. Not that there’s any particular rule to it, but traditionally local party leadership does not run for mayoral positions, but rather go for slightly less demanding and more behind-the-scenes council positions. However, both SD and SDS will probably be forced to put up their respective branch presidents against Janković which should make the Elections of 42 rather interesting, and for two reasons.

Pengovsky already wrote about the fact that little love is lost between Janković and the leadership of Ljubljana Social democrats, specifically between him and branch president Metka Tekavčič. If (or when) the two will be head to head in the debates, sparks will probably be flying all over, as Tekavčič is known for her smile-and-stab talk, which is precisely what ticks Janković off. On the other hand the incumbent mayor has a fuse the length of a closely-mowed grass and is liable to crush Tekavčič into sun dust. It will probably not be pretty, but it will be fun.

Janez Janša’s SDS has similar problems. But different. Theirs was a candidate eagerly awaited, not in the least because Janković took innumerable pot-shots against SDS and Janša, especially after Janša’s government took some 60 million euro in municipality financing away from Ljubljana (or, as they would say: redistributed the monies differently) and relations just went from bad to worse to childish. Ljubljana SDS branch was caught between a rock and a hard place as they had to defend Janša’s policies and moves which were down right insulting towards the capital city. However, rather than amend his party’s stance towards the city, Janša had the leadership of Ljubljana SDS replaced and for a while it seemed they were on a roll.

SDS presented their election platform as early as March this year and former minister of development Žiga Turk was widely speculated to be their pick for the mayoral race. But then it all fell apart. In the aftermath of Janša’s defeat on the referendum on the Arbitration agreement Turk made a Shermanesque statement about not running for mayor and SDS has been quiet on the issue ever since. And so it seems that Dragutin Mate, newly minted leader of Ljubljana SDS and Janez Janša’s war buddy will have to run and take one for the team. Because as things stand now, he has zero chances of defeating Janković.

So the main threat Janković is facing is not from the right but from the left side of the political spectrum, as Vesel Valentinčič and especially Tekavčič can (if the events unfolded unfavourably to Janković) chip off just enough votes to force a second round. In all honesty, this looks unlikely to happen at this time, but it is a possibility that can not be discounted.

Plan B, however, is much more realistic. While some parties will support Janković as mayor, every single party will run for seats in the city council with its own tickets. During this term Janković and his List (not a true party, but a political association for all intents and purposes) held an absolute majority of 23 out of 45 total votes in the council. All other parties and lists in the council aim to prevent that from happening again. But Janković, not to be outdone, is going for broke and wants to repeat the result. We’ll deal with the implications of either outcome some other time, but point is this will be the main battle of 2010 local elections in Ljubljana.

Should be fun. And sleeping will once again be for pussies.

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Janković Comes To Collect. Or At Least Wants To.

Contrary to his promises and expectations Ljubljana mayor Zoran Janković did not open the Stožice stadium and sports hall on 30 June as neither is yet finished. Having initially been scheduled for autumn 2008, the project was postponed when it transpired that the city of Ljubljana did not own all necessary real estate on the building site and had to negotiate with owners who got the land returned to them in a de-nationalization process. Construction of the Stožice complex, which includes a football stadium, a sports hall, a huge shopping centre and a similarly big parking lot, began in late March 2009 with deadline for completion set on 30 June 2010. That is to say, two weeks ago


Mayor Janković and PM Pahor at Stožice some weeks ago probably not debating horticultural tips (source)

The complex is being built under a public-private partnership, where (in a nutshell) the city invested the land into the project whereas the private partner (or partners) will build a shopping centre as well as sports facilities. Private partner will pay its 51% of the project by transferring sports facilities back to city ownership and (presumably) make money by renting out or selling real estate in the shopping centre. That’s the gist of it, anyway.

Skipping the rock and roll the project was engulfed in from the start, the situation today is as follows: The sports facilities are nearly complete, as are parking lots and all other necessary infrastructure (connecting roads, etc). The problem is that the money ran out, since the investors were paying for the project out of their own pocket, hoping to get a credit line which

The investors at this point need somewhere in the vicinity of 150 million euro to finish the entire project (shopping centre included). The sporting facilities alone need some 20 million which would cover for “unplanned” construction (i.e.: someone “forgot” to plan for a training football pitch and hall). And this is where mayor Janković’s woes began.

In ideal circumstances the private partner (a company called Grep, established by Gradis G and Energoplan, two relatively powerful construction companies) would sign a credit line with one or more banks, get the money and get to work. The thing is that this credit line failed to materialise, despite the fact that apparently a syndicate of banks made an offer of such a credit line to Grep way back in January this year. And this is where – as always – things get interesting.

Upon realising (or admitting) that some public funding will be necessary for completion of the project, mayor Janković turned to the state for help. Naturally, this was a not-so-small victory for numerous critics of the project. But Janković maintained (and still maintains) that the city will not fork out a single euro in cash for the project, so he called upon the government to help out with 20 mils.

Let’s be honest: Janković wanted to cash in the heavy political backing he gave to the political left on at least two occasions (2008 elections and 2010 referendum on the arbitration agreement), not to mention the fact that he sees himself and the city he runs as the first line of defence against a political counter-offensive Janez Janša and his SDS will hope to mount in the coming months.

Janković found a sympathetic ear with minister for education and sports Igor Lukšič (of PM Pahor’s Social Democrats) who proposed that the government fork out the cash. However, his colleague (both in government and in the party) finance minister Franci Križanič categorically refused, saying that there’s no legal ground to approve emergency budget funding and that Lukšič can go and spend his budget funds if he so wishes. The catch is that just about that time Prime Minister Borut Pahor announced a 500 million euros worth of spending cuts and naturally it wouldn’t look good if almost 5% of that sum were spent on finishing the Stožice project.

There can be little doubt that the current government owes quite a lot to Zoran Janković. He went out on a limb in support of this government and its policies on several occasions and even though he may not be the sole reason the left won the elections or that the arbitration agreement was ratified on the referendum, he sure as hell helped a lot. So yes, Pahor’s government is indebted to mayor Janković. And debts need to be settled. The problem is that it is being done with taxpayers’ money.

But before we get there, there’s one other aspect we need to cover. Although Janković sees himself as being on the same team with all coalition parties on the national level, he is very much NOT on the same team with them on the local level. This is true especially in the case of Ljubljana branch of Social Democrats, who were one of the two strongest parties in the city until he came along in 2006 and decimated them in elections (cutting the number of their city councillors from thirteen to four, if memory serves).

The powers that were (but were to be no more) never forgave him. This goes especially for leadership of Ljubljana Social Democrats, personified in this case by Metka Tekavčič who (among other things) is widely credited for kick-starting Borut Pahor’s political career. Tekavčič was also considered an eminence grise of the Ljubljana City Council and her nod was vital if one wanted to get things done in this town.

With Janković’s ascent her star faded at least temporarily and she did not take it lightly. The two almost immediately took a disliking to each other and matters weren’t helped with Janković’s tenderness of a bulldozer on steroids when it came to passing decisions through the Council. Their animosity soured even more in the past few months and at the moment the seem to love hating each other’s guts. Which is the sort of environment Janković usually thrives in. But it just so happens that finance minister Križanič is also vice-chairman of SD’s Ljubljana branch and one doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that Križanič’s resolve not to fork out the cash on the national level is at the very least strengthened by the sour relations between leadership of Ljubljana SD and mayor Janković (hint, hint 🙂 )

However, word on the street has it that finance minister Križanič is the least of Janković’s problems. After all, it’s just 20 millions in a project estimated at around 350 million euro. It’s the 150 million credit line which both Grep and Janković are worried about. And rightfully so, it seems. The principal bank of the syndicate in state-owned Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB). And if oracles are to be believed, minister for development Mitja Gaspari (formerly of LDS and presently of SD – since 2008) has a lot of leverage both with the banks Supervisory board as well as its management and it is reportedly him who is not all that keen on seeing the Stožice project being bankrolled. Whether the reason for that is the fact that NLB is not in the best of shapes as it is or whether it is something else, remains a mystery, but there you go.

Banks have reportedly been repeatedly raising the bar for Grep to finally get the credit line. The first benchmark Grep had to meet was having to sign leases for about 45% of all retail space. Grep met this condition, but suddenly banks raised it to 60%, plus some sort of state involvement. And this is where the whole thing just got even more political.

According to Finance daily the contract on bankrolling Stožice project is being signed today (or by the end of the week at the latest). Whether or not this has to do with the fact that Lukšić’s ministry just issued a tender for “co-financing sporting facilities of national importance” we will probably never know for sure, but fact of the matter is that ministry of sport is prepared to spend 9.4 million (8.0m of that is EU funding) on “various” eligible sports facilities with estimated project value of more than 5 million euro. You guessed it, at the moment Stožice project is probably the only one eligible for funding right now, and the tender closes on 25 July. In 10 days.

As minister Lukšič (if not the government) is bending over backwards to lend mayor Janković a helping hand, the opposition is going apeshit. They’ve been foaming at the mouth with rage from the very moment it transpired that NLB is the principal bank in the syndicate. Former minister of economy Andrej Vizjak (SDS) was fuming that a state-owned bank will be saving a project gone wrong and that it will never get its money back (curiously enough he had no problem with the state itself funding the operational costs of Stožice sports facilities). Vizjak backed off, after it was explained to him (time and again) that the syndicate will finance the shopping centre (i.e: the private part of the investment) and not the public part (stadium and sports hall), but the avalanche had started and SDS is careful to make as little distinction between the two, branding the almost-completed (!) project as one huge fuck-up.

And now that Lukšič came to the (sort of a) rescue the opposition as a whole went hysterical and announced an interpelation against the minister. The lead MP in this enterprise is none other than Franc Pukšič, formerly of SDS and now of SLS, who just happens to be (lookie, lookie!) mayor of municipality of Destrnik. Now, don’t get me wrong: The opposition can go about filing interpelations as they please. They can even do it repeatedly (as we’ve seen in the case of Katarina Kresal). But when a four-term MP, who is also a mayor of a provincial municipality and is an expert at bringing the bacon home (I love that phrase!), yaps on about misappropriation of public and EU funds and direct government assistance (which as we all know, is a big no-no in the EU), then I smell another case of double-standards.

Anyways, time is running out. The new deadline for opening what will be known as The Stožice Centre is set for 30 July, with the first basketball game (Slovenia vs. Spain) scheduled for 10 August and the first football game (Slovenia vs. Australia) scheduled a day later. Jose Carreras is due to give a concert on 7 October and Leonard Cohen will make a stop in Arena Stožice on 12 October (although some people may be forced to attend his concert at gunpoint. Kidding! 😉 ). Neglecting the political fallout Janković would undoubtedly have to endure in local election if the stadium and the sports hall were not finished in time, pengovsky cannot in all honesty imagine the humiliation which would ensue if the game with Australia would have to be relocated to – say – Maribor. Yes, in that sense the Stožice project is indeed completely and utterly local in nature 🙂

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Briton Aims for River, Lands on Concrete

In wee hours of Monday morning (or was it Sunday night) a group of merry Britons wandered around Ljubljana and apparently tried to indulge in age-old tradition of British tourists to bathe in the river Ljubljanica. According to POP TV one particularly adventurous 29-year-old leaped across the railing, misjudged his aim and landed on the concrete embankment.


Seriously, how the fuck do you miss that!?!

It would seem that copious amounts of alcohol softened his landing, for when the police arrived to the scene (apparently within minutes) he was told not to move as they were coming to get him. But, probably trying to prove to everyone that he’s OK, the chap reportedly tried to stand up, which only resulted in him falling into the river. Which was his initial plan, but the river, a treacherous little stream on a normal day, was swollen from two days of constant rain and he soon found himself fighting for his life. It was a one-sided fight, not unlike what France Prešeren described in his poem Povodni mož:

Boatmen only saw a swirl
where Urška danced her last twirl

Well, our fearless Briton was luckier than that spoiled bitch Urška. Coppers went right after him and caught him just as he was about to swallow his last gulp of the Ljubljanica. The three of them were then pulled ashore downstream by the rest of the police patrol and instead of literally sleeping with the fishes the would-be swimmer was only treated for hypothermia and alcohol poisoning.

The moral of the story? The good doctor put it best when she said that if they can miss an entire river, then maybe then can miss our goal on Wednesday as well 😈

Fuck You, Kids! Why On Earth Was Yesterday Necessary?!

Student protests gone out of control in Ljubljana, Slovenia from pengovsky on Vimeo.

Some 15.000 students and pupils protested against proposed reform of student work in Slovenia. Protests started in Prešernov trg, but were then – presumably for added effect – continued in front of the Parliament. It is there where situation slipped out of control and all hell broke loose.

After some 15 minutes people started throwing everything they could get their hands on. Rocks, stick, bottles and even chairs were being hurled at cops and into the Parliament. By underage kids! Most of these brats were born after 1991!

What Ljubljana witnessed yesterday was not an outpour of crisis-fueled rage or misery. These kids go to school, do their homework, take tests and have crushes. They are not unemployed, without future or socially disenfranchised. What we’ve seen was a joyride of vandalism, alcohol induced courage and herding instinct by a generation used to getting away with anything.

And for no apparent reason other than the fact that a law is being proposed which would introduce some changes to the field in dire need of regulation. Student work in Slovenia has spiralled out of control and is far from the social corrective it once was. Even worse, most of these kids would be far better off with the new legislation, not in the least because it would allow them to start accumulating pension and welfare benefits as well as officially recognised work experience much earlier, making them much more competitive in the labour market once they graduated.

While I can understand that the above can be a bit much for a 17-year-old to grasp, I can not understand what makes that same kid pick up a stone and hurl it against a building he never even entered. OK, so you’re seventeen and you hate authority. You hate teachers, you hate cops, you even hate the fucking janitor of your building because he represents a system that you’re suppose to fit in.

But while object flew above my head and into robocops’ shields, pengovsky tried to find some logical explanation for all the brutality and rage. And I could find none. They’re not being forced into anything. Funding of school meals is to be altered a bit, but hey, do you really need to fuck up the parliament because state subsidy for your meal drops from 0.8 to 0.6 euro? Do you have to go after robocops with a stick because you’re not allowed to work more than178 hours per month? Do you dig up granite cubes and hurl them through a window because the hourly wage for student work will now start at 4 euro?

Yesterday looked just like any other protest we’ve seen on TV lately. And I suspect that is part of the problem. These kids are great at aping things. They’re great at aping whatever subculture they belong to. They’re great at repeating one liners and moves they’ve seen others do. Pengovsky was, for example, repeatedly told to “stop filming” and then threatened with having his balls broken if he didn’t turn the camera off. Palm-to-the-camera move included. But ideas you cannot ape. You either have them and believe in them or you don’t. And they don’t.

Yesterday made no sense. Not to me and I suspect not to those kids either. But they did it anyway. Because they felt they could. And that they’ll – yet again – get away with it.

I wasn’t angry yesterday. I was just sad.

Ljubljana SDS Gets New Leadership

As autumn municipal elections approach (the date has not yet been set, but second half of October this year seems reasonable), Ljubljana branch of Janez Janša’s Slovene Democratic Party held its electoral conference and picked new leadership. As of yesterday the new leader of Ljubljana SDS is Dragutin Mate who served as interior minister during Janša’s 2004-2008 government.

20100204_mate.jpg
Dragutin Mate, new president of Ljubljana branch of SDS (source)

This in it self would not be news, although Mate played a dubious role in the anti-Roma Ambrus Standoff (to pick an example completely at random). Being branch president does not necessarily mean running for mayor. Indeed, history shows that political parties in Ljubljana often picked other prominent people to run for mayor’s office, whereas branch presidents remained the behind-the-scenes power brokers and/or powerful figures in the City Council (under Ljubljana Statute the mayor does not have a right to a vote in the City Council).

However, things do get interesting when one takes into account that Peter Sušnik stepped down as branch president only days before the conference and announced that he is leaving city politics after a sixteen-year stint (he had hinted at the move in the end-of-the-year-interview for The Firm™), saying in no uncertain terms that he had done his bit. Perhaps no less important than Sušnik politics-fatigue was an interview party leader Janša gave in autumn 2009 where he specifically criticised Ljubljana branch saying that it had underperformed.

This probably was not completely fair to Sušnik. Ljubljana branch of SDS is working in a “hostile” environment. Not just because Slovene capital is considered predominantly left-wing oriented, but – even more importantly – because Janša’s government changed the law on funding of municipalities, depriving Ljubljana of some 53 million euros because it had elected “the wrong man” in 2006 – namely incumbent mayor Zoran Janković. Given the situation, SDS in Ljubljana performed quite well under Sušnik. It was (well, is) the single largest group in the City Council after Janković’s List, by far the largest party group (Janković’s group is not considered a proper party but rather a “group of candidates”) even doubly so in the right-wing part of Ljubjana’s political spectrum.

But be that as it may, the new Ljubljana branch leadership faces a tall order. To secure a better result than their predecessors and put a noticeable dent in Mayor Janković’s ratings. But… There is one positive side to Mate’s becoming the Big SDS Kahuna in the capital. Being born in Čakovec, Croatia, this will probably put an end to below-the-belt hits against Janković being born in Serbia. If there is one thing this town has too much of is the xenophobia, small-mindedness and inferiority complexes which manifested itself shortly before new year when youth organisations crahsed Janković press conference and called him names. So maybe with a Serb-born and a Croat-born Ljubljanchan calling the shots in the city the musty provincial odor this city sometimes still sports will finally clear up.