SLEEPING WITH PENGOVSKY

It’s been a while since pengovsky posted on public opinion polls and we’ve had two od those in the last 14 days, one by Delo (on 3 August) and one by RTV Slovenija on 16 August. Please note that I consider RTV SLO and it’s pollster Interstat a problematic duo, but I include their polls nevertheless – for the moment I give them the benefit of the doubt.

The story so far:

You will notice Social Democrats’ ratings going up and down like a cork in the water. This is obviously a result of RTVSLO moving up the pace of its polls, and since leaders of the left bloc Borut Pahor, Gregor Golobič and Katarina Kresal (of Social Democrats, Zares and Liberal Democrats respectively) went on the record that a coalition with PM Janša’s SDS is out of the question, a whole new dynamic in pre-election rhetoric emerged.

It seems to have dawned on SDS what pengovsky has been saying for quite some time: that although SDS and SD are neck-and-neck in the polls the three left wing parties (SD, Zares and LDS) enjoy a small-but-comfortable lead over the three right wing parties (SDS, SLS, NSi), even if you take RTVSLO’s polls into account:

Specifically, Janez Janša is starting to make nervous noises about the possibility of his party taking the top spot and not getting the mandate for forming the government. To coutner that, said Janša, SDS must win big and not by just the slightest of margins. As we know this might prove a tad difficult, as SDS seems to have canibalised all the votes it could off of SLS and NSi, while making little progress in enlarging the voting base of the right wing option as a whole.

So Janša and his party are afraid that President Danilo Türk (himself supported by SD, Zares and later on by LDS in the presidential elections) might give the mandate to form the government to the party which will clearly be capable of forming a ruling coalition and not (as per convention) to the relative winner of the elections.

The trick is, that – given the projected distribution of votes – whoever gets the mandate will very likely form a ruling coalition one way or another. So it goes without saying that the thought of circumventing this unwritten rule of forming the governement has crossed many minds on the left side od the political spectrum, and Janša apparently got the wind of it.

Personally, however, I think that ignoring convention would be a very bad idea and I hope that President Türk will not succumb to the lure of cutting a shortcut to Janša’s removal from power. Namely, if SDS were to come out on top but the mandate would go to SD, SDS would scream treason, defamation of voters’ decision and what-have-you. And they would have a point. Furthermore, if the left wing parties can’t get a clear mandate to run the country, than perhaprs they’re better off not doing it, since theirs would be a very weak mandate, with SDS, SLS and NSi constantly questioning its legitimacy. And so on, and so on…

So if SDS does come on top eventually (as many people believe it will), then it is only right that PM Janša gets another shot at forming the government. The task just might prove to be a bit more difficult than it sounds and even if he suceeds, he would be presiding over a politicaly very diverse government, in constant danger of falling appart.

Pengovsky’s projection: Regardless of the actual perctentage, SD and SDS will continue to battle it out until the last day of election campaing, knowing very well that whoever gets the top spot will most likely form the government. I really think that any sort of shennanigans with giving the mandate to the party which would come in second would be an extremely bad idea.

Data is available as an MS Excel file.

Election 2008 badge is updated to reflect the last available poll (RTV SLO), although I stress again that its results are problematic at best.

Today a wee bit more serious post on the political implications of the Šentvid tunnel fiasco. Long story short, as a chunk of fire-retardant foam fell off the ceiling for the second time, hitting a car of a German tourist, thus forcing closure of the tunnel for the third time in four weeks, the media and public outcry was so huge that it was obvious that heads must roll – even in Slovenia, where politicians and senior officials seem to be innoculated against responsibilis objectivis, sensus vulgaris and moralis generalis, especially when little green pieces of paper are involved.

The destroyed car of the unfortunate German tourist (source: Dnevnik video)

Medical analogies aside, the mere facts that the tunnel was attrociously expensive and that it was completed more than a year after the initial deadline had passed drew enough criticism that deep down everyone quietly agreed with Minister of Transport Radovan Žerjav, when he said (during the opening ceremony) that he hopes everyone will soon forget all the bad things surrounding the construction of the tunnel. His nightmares, however, were only beginning.

Truth be told, Radovan Žerjav was minister for little less than a year, so he cannot personally be blamed for every fuck-up with the tunnel, however, with statements like this he put his head on a platter. Besides, he was selected because he was suppose to do a better job than his predecessors.

So when they cleaned up the mess after the first closure, reopened the tunnel and said that this time it was safe for real, imagine the disbelief and outcry when it turned out that the tunnel was not safe. It wasn’t just that the foam hit a moving vehice (smack right down on the hood of the car), but also the fact that the SOS line in the tunnel wasn’t working and that luckily another driver came by (it was 2 AM on a weekday) and called for help using his mobile phone. Luckily noone was hurt and time was not of the essence.

Heads were obviously going to roll. Or were they? A blame game ensued, with the government and DARS (the State Motorway Company) blaming the contractor, Ivan Zidar‘s SCT, the latter blamed its subcontractor, a British company Ceramicoat, and they in turn blamed the initial poor state of the entrance to the tunnel and poor management of the project. Days later, the board of DARS could no longer play stupid and tendered their resignations, as did minister Žerjav.

But this is where things start getting interesting: Both DARS’s board and the minister (a member of SLS, one of the junior coalition parties) offered to resign. But didn’t resign. They effectively said “hey, it’s up to you”. Furthermore they made their offer to the government. In case of DARS that was the propper way of doing things, as it was the government who named members of the board in the first place. However, minister of transport offered his resignation to PM Janša personally, and I’m still not sure whether that was an extremely cunning political move or just another case of political arrogance and ignorance combined.

Namely: under Slovenian constitution, ministers are elected by the parliament, not named by the prime minister. Thus the minister blatantly ignored constitutional provisions, as he would have to offer his resignation to the parliament, which would then have to hold a vote on it. But now the minister – knowingly or not – pulled the prime minister (who until now was keeping awfully quiet on the matter) front and centre, forcing him to take sides. Although it seems a very straightfoward case, the PM must have found himslef in quite a predicamend and kept quiet ever since. He is expected to make a statement (of sorts) today, almost two weeks after the final closure of the tunnel.

If the PM accepts the minister’s resignation, he a) admits that he let SLS pick the wrong guy (again) and b) grossly exceeds his constitutional authorities and abuses powers vested in him by taking decisions which are only the parliament’s to make. If however, he rejects Žerjav’s resignation, the PM takes direct responsibility for the fuck-ups surrounding the tunnel, putting his own head on a platter thirty-eight… no… thirty-seven days before the elections.

So far Janša is treadng carefully, but it will be interesting to see what course of action he takes. He might make the minister resign of his own accord and let him keep running the minister in a caretaker capacity, as the PM is unlikely to bother looking for a replacement candidate during an election campaign. On the other hand, forcing another SLS minister to resign will probably sever whatever links there still are between that party and the rulling coalition. This miight result in SLS walking out of the coalition just prior to elections, making this yet another coalition SLS walked out of at the very end of a term.

More will be known in the next few days, so stay tuned….

Today’s post is already sligthly outdated as new polls were published earlier in the day, but as I didn’t get around to entering the data, here are the results of a poll ran by TV Slovenia on Sunday. It is a funny poll and one could make all sorts of conclusions out of it. But as you’ll see, the main problem this poll has is – credibility…

In this latest poll none but the two big parties (SD and SDS) received more than four percent of the vote. Which is odd. More likely, it is incorrect. These results are not corroborated in any of the existing polls – not even the one commisioned by the government. So I’m wondering: didn’t anyone at Interstat (they’re TV SLO’s pollsters) double-check the results or were they too busy tweaking them to make sure SDS comes out on top, to notice that they were getting a completely distorted picture in the lower part of the chart…

In any case, a problematic poll. Hence, no pengovsky’s projection today. Tommorow we’ll have more serious data to work with.

As noted yesterday, a new political party was formed in Maribor a couple of days ago. Well… Technically speaking, an already existing party named Kresnica (literally: Glow-worm… go figure) was renamed into Christian Democratic Party. Generally speaking, the renamed party will promote “classical” conservative values, the sort one would excpect from a party of christian democratic profile. There is only one caveat. Well, a couple, actually…

Marko Štrovs while he was still being listened to (source)

WHAT’S GOING ON…

Although the “CD” part of Slovenian political spectrum seems to be empty, this is hardly the case. Both Slovene People’s Party (SLS) and Nova Slovenija (NSi) tap that particular pool of votes, both because they share similar values, but also because their history is much more intertwined than their names suggest. When the media started using the term “Slovene Christian Democrats” for the new party, SLS was slightly iritated and said only it (SLS) can legaly use this term and the SKD acronym (see below for explanation). But if SLS was iritated, NSi went outright apeshit. Understandibly so:

Just as NSi was formed by a renegade group of SLS+SKD, the new party is spear-headed by its former members and sympatisers, most notably Marko Štrovs one of Slovenia’s foremost experts on pensions systems, who until recently was a high-ranking NSi party member. Months ago, however, he made a rather serious cock-up when he said that the pensioners in Slovenia are so well off that they should only be afraid of kicking the bucket. There was an uproar, but the party didn’t lift a finger to protect him and fed him to the media. They gave him a desk job withing the party, where he once again caught media attention by saying that NSi in being sliced like a salami by Janez Janša and his SDS – he was reffering to NSi’s slow but relentless trend of hemmoraging votes. NSi leadership reacted swiftly, accusing him of panic-mongering and cut him out of the loop entirely. Štrovs hit back where it hurt NSi most: he did extacly what they did eight years ago, and for more or less the same reasons.

…CUT TO HISTORY LESSON…

When multi-party elections were held for the first time in Slovenia in 1990, suprisingly enough, it was the Slovene Christian Democrats (SKD) who got the most votes within the opposition bloc DeMOS and not any of the parties which were at the forefront of the democratic drive (funnily, the reformed communists got the largest number of votes on a per-party level, but most of the oppostition was joined in a political alliance DeMOS and they formed the first democratically elected government, with then-little-known Lojze Peterle as the PM).

Anyways, things went dowhill from there for Christian Democrats as Janez Drnovšek toppled Lojze Peterle in spring 1992 in a vote of no-confidence and the SKD went into coalition with LDS from time to time until Drnovšek himself was toppled by SLS in spring 2000. But not before a merger between SKD and SLS, briefly making the merged party the most powerful political force in Slovenia, toppling Janez Drnovšek as the PM and replacing him with Andrej Bajuk only weeks after the merger. Only months later, however, several high-profile members of SKD part of the new party left the party citing irreconcilable differences and formed NSi, Nova Slovenija only months prior to elections and – contrary to expectations – made it past the parliamentary treshold comfortably.

…AND WE’RE BACK. BUT WHO’S GOT THEIR BACK?

So Marko Štrovs and Jože Duhovnik (another former high-profile SKD member) did what he, Andrej Bajuk, Lojze Peterle and a whole lot of other people did in 2000. Unlike SLS which is going about its own wobbly path, the leadership of NSi is genuinely shocked, one could even say frightened. They’ve started a smear-campaign against Štrovs, and just yesterday released a statement saying that 80 percent of new party’s platfrom is copy/pasted from NSi’s platform and that it had only just emerged that Marko Štrovs was a member of the communist party in the previous regime.

Now, membership in the Party used to be magnum crimen for most right-wing parties at various points in their history, but NSi stuck to this stipulation (Janša’s SDS, for example never had it, as Janša himself was a zealous Party member – so zealous in fact that the Party threw him out. SDS rather screened their membership against working for Yugoslav intelligence services). Personally, I couldn’t care a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys is Štrovs belonged to the Party or not, but the nature of NSi’s press release (using hearsay and denunciations: “we’ve been alerted to his Party membership by one of his former co-workers” as well as explaininig their own reactions: “we have not reacted nervously, we merely wanted to point out several inconsitencies and manipulations“) suggests that Štrovs is on to something.

Now, pengovsky happens to know that membership of NSi is not exactly thrilled with the current leadership, but after a long power-struggle between Lojze Peterle and Andrej Baujk two years ago local divisions raised their voice and said that enough is enough and that – although far from perfect – Bajuk should remain party president and that a new leadership will be chosen after elections. Even more, Bajuk privately admitted that he’s fed up with the job and that he will not seek re-election.

So, the question everyone is asking, why did Štrovs and Duhovnik do it? Are they just disenchanted or are there far more sinister forces at work? Given all of the above, I would bet on the fact that they smell blood and want revenge. But if what they say is true and they don’t have a larger political and/or financial backing, they are either very naive or outright lying. There is no way they can make it into the parliament on 21 September without some firm financial and political backing, because:

a) unlike NSi in 2000 they’ve got no sitting MPs which would by law by them airtime on national radio and television

b) the polarisation of the political arena is reaching gigantic proportions this time around and there will be little room available for the little guys. They may not like to hear it, but that’s the way things are at the moment.

But since NSi is considered to be one of the little guys, it is entirelly possible that Štrovs’s KDS will chip away just enough votes to keep NSi below the 4 percent parliamentary threshold. Some say that this is precisely Štrovs’s aim and that it is the political left, especialy former President Milan Kučan who is behind the project (in a more fervent right-wing mind this fits perfectly with accusations of Štrovs’s Party membership). However, one should ask oneself who really benefits if NSi doesn’t make it into the parliament. And the answer is: Janez Janša and his SDS.

Namely: Slovenian electoral system preffers bigger parties – meaning that the votes cast for parties which did not make it part the threshold are distributed between all the other parties by applying some heavy mathemathics, where larger parties get more of the undistributed vote than the smaller parties (I’m still mustering enough will to wite the monster of a post on electoral system). But whether Štrovs is doing to his former party what he acussed Janša of doing remains to be seen. If KDS will run a high-profile campaign, it will be obvious that there are powerful forces at work, trying to reshuffle the cards at that end of the political spectrum.