SLEEPING WITH PENGOVSKY

Yesterday I promised to share with you – the unsuspecting public – some more thoughts on how Zmago Jelinčič can maintain a solid showing when parties with a far better structure can’t put together a decent act.

Some would claim something along the lines of mainstream politics being unable to find the answers to the challenges of an ever more globalised society and thus making room for single-issue or populist parties promising a quick fix and then go about citing examples of Jörg Haider in Austria and Jean Marie Le Pen in France. Which may even be true up to a point (more on “instant politics” in one of the future posts), but – as you no doubt know by now – in Slovenia, global trends are something only tangentially followed.

Zmago Jelinčič and his Slovene National Party are perhaps best described as a post-modern politician/party. Zmago in essence is the SNS and that’s the way a-ha, a-ha he likes it. In socialist times he was a known quantity to both the police (weapons trafficking) and regulars at Ljubljana ballet (where he was a member of the cast) and made himself more publicly known during the war of independence where he put on a show as a some sort of a vigilante:

Special forces my ass! Zmago may be an expert showman, but when he claimed to have singlehandedly captured a tank near Vrhnika, only to be discovered that he missed the thing at point-blank range using a rocket launcher, he was arrested by the police and spent the rest of the war in a prison cell 😀

But the episode launched him in the political arena for real and he immediatelly set forth a nationalist political platform, singling out neighbouring Croatia as Slovenia’s greatest enemy after the war of independence. He also has a curious melange of other political persuasions which don’t neceserily fit one another, but Zmago doesn’t seem to mind and niether does his electorate.

But to cut a long story short, Zmago was always deemed as an annoying little sleaze-bag, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time and though everyone wanted to get rid of him from the parliament, he just kept popping up again. His election results were accordingly minimal. However, as the right wing parties – in an attempt at getting all the votes they can – started venturing into the nationalist area (especially with relation to Croatia), they found themselves on Jelinčič’s turf and suddenly don’t know how to play the game anymore. They’re trying to promote a nationalist agenda without coming off as nationalist (a classic example of trying to fuck without sticking it in). Thus they are legitimising Jelinčič’s political platform, making him instantly more appealing to the general public. Furthermore, as the mainstream right-wing parties are trying to be “the civilised nationalists”, Jelinčič steps in with strong and decisive rhetoric and an occasional PR stunt (like painting afresh Slovene border stoned in a disputed border area).

So what we are seeing is that the coalition parties are trying to carve some room for themselves in the nationalist part of the voting body, but when those voters are finally nudged into stating their political prefference, they see Jelinčič – and not the “classic” political right wing – as their natural choice. Somewhere along the line comes DeSUS (the pensioner’s party) to cook up some more shit, but more on that in the next few days.

So, time for foolilng around is over. Today we have a new Delo poll, showing that Janša’s SDS has almost caught up with opposition Social Democrats. Zares takes the third spot, while the winners of the week are Zmago Jelinčič and his Slovene National Party who took fourth place this time around. Here are the current standings:

This time around I’d like us to have a look at what I like to call political cannibalism. I’ve already noted that we are most likely up for a highly polarised endgame, with the two major parties overshadowing the rest. But we’re months away from the election day and yet every party seems to have already spent the potential for organic growth. So all that the parties have left is stealing voters from one another. And while it may be possible to steal some votes from across the ideological divide, each party seems to be cannibalising every other party within its political bloc.

Take the political left: What we have there is a threesome between Pahor’s SD, Golobič’s Zares and Kresal’s LDS, and from the above graph it is obvious that electorate tends to migrate a bit between these parties. At the moment this trend is especially dangerous for the LDS as it is the weakest of the three. This fact is only amplified by both SD and Zares picking up any support they might have overlooked out there. SD struck a partneship with Christian Socialist Party (an insignificant little party that never made it to the parliament – it never even came close), whereas Zares only yesterday teamed up with Junijska lista, which – in political terms – ammount to little more than a whist club. You might call it forming a broad coalition, I call it fighting for leftovers and LDS isn’t invited apparently.

Basically the same thing is happening on the right side of the political spectrum, where the SDS is feeding of both SLS and NSi. Its just that there are no obscure poitical parties to form an alliance with. Besides – the PM likes to depend on his own devices.

But this in-fihgting on both sides is actually futile, as the following graph will demonstrate:

Disregarding the Večer poll as a fluke (no data to corroborate that particular poll has emerged), we can see that the relative difference between the left bloc (SD, Zares, LDS) and the right bloc (SDS, SLS, NSi) remains more or less the same, suggesting that the semi-wildly fluctuactions in parties’ rankings can be attributted to voter transition from one party to another, rather than from one political bloc to the other. This early in the game, this is definitely not good as it can lead to “voter fatigue” as well as extremely low blows from both sides.

Political added value will be in high demand this season, it seems.

Still to come this week: How the parties started campaiging. What keeps Jelinčič in high single digits. And who the fuck is Joško Joras?!?

Yesterday I gave a passing mention to a poll-rigging faux pax by the ruling Slovene Democratic Party. To cut a long story short, the free daily Žurnal24 (lots of pictures and ads, limited or no useful content) ran a web-poll on 9 March asking people whom they support: PM Janez Janša or the once-almighty Andrijana Starina Kosem, who broke rank and blew the whistle on Janša’s meddling with the media and state-owned comapnies. Apparently the very next day the PM got as much as 115.000 votes, against some 6000+ for ASK. That’s 120.000 clicks in less than 24 hours just for this one poll. That’s 5.000 clicks per hour or 1,38 clicks per second.

A lot.

Too much, actually. Web polls are a shit. Everybody knows that. You cannot control the sample which renders them unsuable beyond filling up some white space on your website. Also, they are hugely unpopular. Žurnal24 went on the record saying that usually they register only a couple of hundred votes on any given subject. OK, say you expected 1200 votes since the question was deliberatly controversial. But 120.000? A hundred times more? No go. It’s just not possible. So the IT people at Žurnal24 launched their own investigation and found out that a computer or a cluster of computers, residingin on an SDS-owned domain was rapid-firing clicks, voting in favour of the PM. When confronted with this, SDS spokesperson at first refused to comment, saying only that the system allowed for a multiple voting from a single IP, but later issued a statement denying any abuse and addind that they “only made use of the voting system at Žurnal24 website“. Blimey! The statemenent reveals something quite astonishing: that they were in on it. This was apparently an orchestrated attempt at manufacturing a favourable result. Even more, the statement shows that SDS finds this sort of behaviour entirely acceptable.

Every party is keen on fixing the polls. It makes them look good and there’s always a chance of jump-starting a positive trend. But to noone will admit it, of course. Except SDS, apparently. Time and again I am amazed and baffled by sheer arrogance this party is capable of. Every other political party knows this is wrong and at least has the decency to try to hide it and make the result believable. But not SDS. It mass-clicked a staggering 115.000 votes for its boss and then went: “What?”.

What amazes me most is their belief that they can actually get away with it. This is not the first time something like this has happened. Remeber Vroči stol, when Janša got 83% over Pahor? It looked really pathethic and one would think that SDS learned something from that sorry episode. Apparently not. I mean, who are they trying to fool? If you want the people to believe something, you have to make it believable. But apparently the belief that power is theirs to have – that they are somehow entitled to it by default – is so deeply rooted within the party faithful that they have no scruples left and are bent on creating a favourable reality than adapting to it an existing one.

This is the party whose president decried the media criticism he was/is facing as opposition propaganda and now that same party would have us believe that 95 percent of the people support the prime minster. This is the party whose president regularely brushes aside far more competent polls as biased and unimportant and now that same party freely admits to abusing a loophole in a meagre and trully insignificant webpoll to create a favourable-if-unbelievable result. This is the party which – for better of for worse – thinks that if theory doesn’t fit the facts, well, so much worse for the facts. Because they know what the public opinion is. It’s just that everyone in this country is hell-bent on removing them from power and no real poll results are published. So they created some.

Sometimes I entertain by myself thinking that people who speed-click or phone-in in favour of the government are kept in large numbers in a dark basement, in a large steel-barred cage, their legs chained to the table, being fed raw meat and a Snickers bar twice a day. But in reality these people are almost like you and me. Its just that they know.

More polls. The latest one was done by NinaMedia and run by Dnevnik daily and POP TV. Two things stand out. Firstly, the poll recorded an almost exact same percentage of undecided voters than a month ago (a rather welcome change from the wildly fluctuating number of “don’t knows” we’ve seen in the last couple of months). Secondly, the nationalists (SNS) led by Zmago Jelinčič recorded a sharp rise in popularity.

We can safely assume that Jelinčič’s rise in popularity is directly and indirectly the result of renewed border disputes between Slovenia and Croatia. As the latter revoked its Ecological Fishery Zone and was in return given a seat on the fast train to the EU, Slovenia has lost its leverage in Brussels and must now deal with Croatia on its own. Its just that the current situation suits politicians on both sides of the border just fine. The dispute is easy ground for scoring cheap political points. All you need is to go to the disputed area, have cameras follow you and start talking tough. If you repaint a border-marker ot two, all the better. This is exactly whar Zmago Jelinčič did: He went into a bush that supposedly separates Slovenia and Croatia on the bank of the river Mura, and went about single-handedly protecting Slovene national interests. Or so he says. TV crews obligingly followed and participated in this charade and made Zmago the day’s headline. Cocksucking supreme, if you ask me. Why not just ignore the guy?

In any case, Zmago seems to have struck a chord with some of the 2,7% additional voters who support him. I would sumbit to you, however, that a large proportion of his newfound support materialised “by extension”, so to speak. Namely, anytime Croatia is on the menu, people instinctively think of Jelinčič and his anti-Croatian rhetoric. In any case, Zmago Jelinčič and his SNS are the only party making any serious gains this time around

Having said that, the other part of the nationalist wing, Sašo Peče’s Lipa is again loitering around the 1% mark, which isn’t exactly good news for Sašo, as he should be making headlines by now, having a new party and all. In other races, Katarina Kresal’s LDS seems to have closed the gap on Zares, and is now trailing the party led by Gregor Golobič by a mere 1,1 percent, while SD and SDS kept first and second place respectively, with both parties losing some support but still breathing down each other’s neck.

We now have two sets of polls for a sort-of-longitudal comparison. If we take Delo’s polls of February and March and look at them side by side – well, one above another, actually – with Ninamedia’s polls of the same period, we can recognize some similarities, especially as far as LDS, Zares, SNS and SLS are concerned (the latter just can’t get off the ground). But there are also big differences: In Delo poll Janša’s SDS took the lead with Pahor’s Social democrats coming in second, while DeSUS and NSi enjoyed a hefty addition to their popularity, while Ninamedia poll detects an opposite situation, with SD marginally leading over SDS and DeSUS and NSi taking a slump

Pengovsky’s projecton: As other subjects grow more imporant in this campaign, Jelinčič’s bump is not expected to last. But this is fast becoming an eight (OK, at least seven) horse race, where a development in any of the smaller parties might have huge impact on any of the two big parties. So a continuosly strong showing by Zares had made its president Gregor Golobič self-confident to the point of not excluding joining a ruling coalition, although he was very conservative about his party’s goals as late as December last. But apparenly a lot can change in three months. So, if Zares and LDS (and possibly DeSUS) manage to hold on to or even improve their current ratings, their importance might grow far beyond their size as Borut Pahor will be pressed from all sides to form a centre-left government (with him being the centre – in more ways than one).

Oh, and while we’re on the polls issue: POP TV reports that SDS went mouse-click happy (Slovene only, I’m afraid) as one or more computers within its domain were used to vote on a web-poll run by Žurnal24 daily. What apparently happened is that SDS organised a click campaign and bumped the support for PM Janša in the poll. Before the trick was spotted, the poll said that 95% of responeed supported the PM against Andirjana Starina Kosem . Can’t say I’m surprised, really, because we’we seen something like that in Vroči Stol, when 83% of respondees supported Janez Janša against Borut Pahor. When will these guys learn that old tricks just don’t work any more?

EDIT: Olimpija lost yesterday. Bugger.