Category: Slovenia

As this year’s election campaign in Slovenia slowly shifts into second gear, cracks are appearing in the structure of the Slovene political left – which was never of a particularly strong construction to begin with. Now, it is a generally accepted fact that in almost any more or less developed democracy parties of the political left are prone to internal bickering and in-fighting. This is nowhere more true than in Slovenia where there tales of people crossing the road to avoid meeting other people from the same political bloc are legendary (this is – or at least was – especially true of the various leftist think-tanks where theoretichal disagreements often turn into personal animosities).

The Trio From The Left Bloc(k) (source)

However, this modus operandi is fast becoming obvious to the general public as well. It seems that the three leaders of the left bloc, Borut Pahor, Katarina Kresal and Gregor Golobič, of Social Democrats, LDS and Zares respectively are cautious (to say the least) about forging a pre-election coalition, much to the annoyance of former President Milan Kučan, who days ago publicly placed a rhetorical question, why is it so hard to say that certain parties are politicaly more compatible than others – a very clear signal that Milan Kučan, the living legend of the Slovene political left and a powerul figure in his own right, thinks that the left bloc should state its intentions loudly, clearly and transparently.

Contrary to what some perhaps expected, Kučan’s call recevied a muted responce by the three leaders. And for a good reason, it would seem. There are a couple of factors which make forging closer ties between SD, LDS and Zares not the brightest of ideas. At the moment at least.

Firstly, there’s the issue of disintegration LDS. Fact of the matter is that many of LDS’s former bretheren found their new home just around the corner (so to speak) in SD and Zares and embracing them as partners shortly after they skeddadled as party members would not go down well with a big part of LDS membership. Not that LDS is in any position to dictate terms at the moment, as it is still leaking members to other parties.

For precisely the same reasons – just put the other way around – Zares is not all that keen on marrying LDS. I mean, they’ve just gone through a very messy and a very public divorce and now they are to shack up together again? No way! Besides, Zares has nothing to lose one way or another. It’s making it across the 4 percent vote treshold and into the parliament is almost a given and perhaps they’d be even better of in the opposition for their first “true” term as a parliamentary party. Gregor Golobič said so less than six months ago and has since then only once mentioned the possibility of Zares going all the way to the top (i.e.: being a member of the ruling coalition).

And finally, Borut Pahor is doing everything possible to show that he is not Kučan’s puppet, even to the point of picking fights fith the former Prez where none are necesary. When Kučan went on the record saying that it is not a given that Borut Pahor will be the next prime minister, the latter responded by saying that will not make way for anyone who might be “chosen behind the scenes” to run the country. The force of Pahor’s responce was quite disproportionate to Kučan’s remark, which speaks of at least two things:

One: Social Democrats are not on as strong a footing as they would have us believe (and Pahor knows it) – were he totally sure of his position, Pahor would have let Kučan’s remark slide or even embrace it (something along the lines of: “of course it is not a given. It is for the people to decide”. Instead he took it as a direct challenge and responded in kind.

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Two: Borut Pahor is very much haunted by political shadows. He distances himself from Milan Kučan, but knows that Kučan’s support will be one the key elements in gaining that final push which would propel him to the top job. In short, he wants to have the cake and eat it. At the very least he wants Kučan not to support any of the other two parties in the left bloc. The other two parties are of course hoping he will do just that.

There is however one more shadow that haunts all three parties. It takes the form of Ljubljana mayor Zoran Janković who is punching way above his weight at the moment. It seems that everyone recognises him as a sort of a king-maker and is keen on pleasing him. This is why Zoki can get away with almost anything. Even the fact that he will – watch this – summon all three opposition parties to the City Hall and demand to see what their policies towards Ljubljana will be – and only then will he announce his support for a particular party – if any. Ballsy.

So while Social Democrats, LDS and Zares are avoiding becoming to comfy with each other, trying to please Zoran Janković and running circles around Milan Kučan, elections are approaching. But recent events suggest that the three party leaders may have opted for the right tactic and that it is Milan Kučan who excercised some poor judgement this time around.

Namely – presidential elections, held autumn last showed that if there is more than one left-wing candidate in the race, left-leaning voters are slightly more likely to actually turn up at the polling station. So three slightly different platforms might on the whole draw more left wing vote than one unified (and- by exention – watered down) political platform of a single bloc.

Secondly – having three independent and only loosely connected parties attacking the ruling coalition gives prime minister Janez Janša three political enemies to worry about (plus Milan Kučan, plus Zoran Janković, plus Karel Erjavec of DeSUS and Bojan Šrot of SLS- even though the latter two are formally coalition members.) and makes matters infinitely more complicated from his point of view. It the three parties were to stand as a unified bloc, PM Janša would only have to focus on one person or issue, immediately putting the supposedly stronger bloc on the defensive.

And finally – the way things stand now, the ever more apparent cracks, bickering and in-fightings are actually streghts, which would immediately turn into weaknesses if any sort of a unified political alliance between the three parties would be announced. The latter would require a single leadership, a single platform and a single voice and none of the three parties are prepared to give way to any of the other two – and the possibility of an outside man becoming leader of the bloc was immediately rejected by Borut Pahor. Whether or not Katarina Kresal and Gregor Golobič share the sentiment is not known (I’d even venture to say that the latter would welcome an outside man as a leader – he’s done it before, you know), but this option is off the table for the moment, at least.

I realize that Slovenian elections may be of little to no interest to anyone but me and some other hard core freaks. But thought it’d be a kindda neat thing to do, so I created a badge representing the latest poll results in the ongoing election campaign.

The badge will only display the data for the decided vote and will for the moment be based on the assumption that SD, LDS and Zares will form an opposition (left wing) bloc while SDS, NSi, SLS and DeSUS will continue in their existion coalition and will be joined by SNS. Lipa, for the moment, remains out there somewhere.I realise it’s kinnda nerdy, but if you like, you can put the badge on your blog/site as well by copy/pasting the following code

 
<a href="https://www.pengovsky.com/category/elections-08/">
<img border="0" src="https://www.pengovsky.com/sloelec2008.png" /></a> 

Badge is 180 pixels in width and 235 pixels in height and will change every time I publish results of a new poll to reflect the latest numbers. Depending on coalition relationships the compostition of both blocs may also change as may the graphics itself. But the dimensions will remain the same.

A new edition of Politbarometer, a more or less monthly check-up of public opinion polled and published by Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre revealed what has a Ninamedia poll a month ago detected: that Zmago Jelinčič and his SNS are on the rise. This time around they took the third spot, which should ring alarm bells all over the political spectrum.

NOTE: for unknown reasons Politbarometer failed to detect Sašo Peče’s Slovenska Lipa. It only cites 1% of the vote under “other”. For reasons of continuity I put that result in Lipa’s column.

According to this poll SNS is the only party on the rise, which is bad bad news especially for the left bloc, because it means that the canmpaign will acquire an increasingly populistic tone. But it is even worse news for the right bloc, because it is now clear that Janša’s attempts to take over SLS and NSi votes have resulted in driving the voters of these two parties over to SNS, suddenly making it a force to be reckoned with. But this also sheds a whole new light on possible post-election coalition arangements. So far we’ve only compared two easily identifiable blocs: SD, LDS and Zares (left bloc) versus SDS, SLS and NSi (right bloc), with other parties playing a side role. At the moment this gives us the following division of the decided voters (note that as much as 39 percent of voters remain undecided) :

If we now indulge in some political mathematics, we are presented with two options. ONE: Call it a true left/right split. In this scenario SD, LDS, Zares and DeSUS form a completely left wing coalition and enjoy a comfortable 6 percent lead over the right bloc. TWO: The ruling coalition is extended to include Jelinčič’s SNS and in this scenario we are faced with a split down the middle, which – some claim – is the natural state of Slovene politics.

Translated into reality (with some help of electoral mathematics), this would mean that a left-wing government would enjoy a small, but managable majority in the parliament, whereas a right-wing government would have a mininimal majority, possibly having to rely on the votes of minortiy deputies, which traditionally vote with the government.

There is another element, however. Today, President Danilo Türk addresses the parliament on the issue of the Constitutional Court, which is subject to increasing political pressures as well as burdened with an exponential increase in cases. Türk – whose yesterday’s speech to the European Parliament has won international acclaim – will most likely strike at the core of the issue and possibly shift the focus on the debate to some elementary problems this country is faced with – the independency of the judicial branch being chief among them.

Pengovsky’s projection: Which of the two scenarios will occur mostly depends on which party gets the most votes. If Janša’s SDS tops Pahor’s SD, then the second scenario is much more likely to happen, as Janša will (as he should) do anything in his power to continue running the country. However, the Prez’s speech might stir the pot just enough to add some real content to the election campaign and force the parties to take a stand with or against the proposed issues, and – by extention – with or against the President himself.

After a quiet three-week period, we’ve had another poll by NinaMedia, which basically shows more of the same. Namely, that the oppostition Social Democrats and the ruling Slovene Democtratic Party are still neck-and-neck, with other parties trailing far behind. But the “far behind section” is fast becoming a three-way race, with Liberal democrats, Zares and now SNS all squeezing within one-and-a-half percent.

Now that Borut Pahor has more or less made it clear that he will (at least at first) seek to form a left-wing coalition with Zares and LDS, a complete polarisation of Slovene politics is imminent if not already here. This is why a comparison of percentages between left and right bloc is suddenly very telling. The graph below shows that the three opposition left-wing parties could at the moment form a government on their own, since the finer points of Slovene electoral mathematic allow for an absolute majority with around 30-40 percent of the vote, if the rest of the vote is fractured enough.

Here the “cannibalisation effect” is very much obvious. The coalition parties (minus DeSUS, which is tehcnically a coalition party, but left-wing) can muster only slightly below 25% percent of the vote, which means that Janez Janša – the way things stand now – would have to co-opt both DeSUS (again) and Jelinčič’s nationalists, both in addition to his current rather alienated “natural” coalition partners – SLS and NSi. Both are recording depressingly low percentages and pengovsky is none too happy about that.

However, elections are still almost six months away and it would appear that we will witness at least one more referendum – this time on regions. More on that in one of the future posts (when more details become available), but at the moment it seems like a very nifty move by PM Janša – the government has ammended its proposal to include City of Ljubljana as a separate region and reduced the number of proposed regions (from 14 to 12), which makes the idea a whole lot more appealing to many people.

Pengovsky’s projection: As the left is trying not to fix what ain’t broken while it enjoys a comfortable lead over the right bloc, the government (and especially the PM) are looking for ways to spend the left bloc’s potentital by egaging it into relatively unimportant but nevertheless bloody political fights. The upcoming referendum (the date is yet to be announced) is primarily aimed at bolstering government’s ratings both by making the left loose energy over it and by giving the people another punch bag just before the elections on which they can vent their frustrations with the government. So, even Janša and the governmetn lose the referendum, they are much more likely to win the election (but not necesarily win the majority in the parliament). And if SDS comes out as the relative winner, you can be sure that Zmago Jelinčič and his nationalists will find themselves very close to the top levels of power – possibly getting a ministerial posting or two. Zmago Jelinčič as minister of interior? Did we really drop that low?