Notes On Slovenian Recognition of Palestine (Part 2)

Remember the excitement that followed the announcement of imminent Slovenian recognition of Palestine? Well, guess what…


Slovenian ministry of foreign affairs (source)

Turns out Newton’s Third Law applies to diplomacy as well. Foreign minister Karl Erjavec made a big splash about it, declaring that the time is right, that Slovenia will press on with this regardless of support (or lack thereof) within the EU and that it’s about time this country shows it can craft and independent foreign policy. Only a week later his foot is dangerously close to meeting his mouth.

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Notes On Slovenian Recognition of Palestine

One has to feel sorry for the Palestinians these days. Not only are they being roundly fucked over (again) with the US now not even pretending to be an honest broker any-more, they’re also being used as a campaign prop in Muddy Hollows. And you can tell by the photo below Abu Mazen is none too pleased about it.


Karl Erjavec and Mahmoud Abbass (source: Slovenian MFA)

Namely, Karl Erjavec, leader of pensioners’ party DeSUS who also doubles as foreign minister announced yesterday that Slovenia is ready to recognise Palestine as a sovereign country even without concerted action on the part of the EU and has indicated the parliament could vote on this in March or April. What Erjavec hasn’t indicated, however, is the fact that Slovenia will hold parliamentary elections in late May or early June.

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Half A Rock From Prijedor

Pengovsky did some punditizing for media outlets which really should have known better in the last couple of days and weeks which means it’s time both readers of this blog be brought up to speed on the recent developments in Muddy Hollows. Which, fairly or not, have for the past ten days or so been focused on the loan-taking habits of the largest opposition party.


The Glorious Leader holding half a rock.

Namely, it transpired that SDS in order to finance the upcoming election campaigns took out a funny-looking EUR 450.000 loan from Dijana Đuđić, a 32-year-old Bosnian Serb woman. As the story broke, the faeces met with the proverbial rotating air blades apparatus, providing for a spectacular shitshow.

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Report Implicates President, Leader Of The Opposition in TEŠ 6 Clusterfuck

Friday last the National Assembly adopted an interim report by the parliamentary committee on TEŠ 6 coal power plant in Šoštanj. And it is a bit of a bombshell. Namely, the report deals with procurement procedures in the project which ballooned from an estimated EUR 600 million to almost 1.4 billion and states that the contract to build TEŠ 6 should have been offered via public tender and that active steps were taken to prevent that from happening, thus keeping the project non-transparent and a fertile ground for corruption.


The Šoštanj coal power plant (source)

However, unlike most committee reports of the kind, this one goes further and actually names names. The principal enablers of the TEŠ 6 fiasco according to the report were: prime minister (now president) Borut Pahor, prime minister (now MP and leader of the largest opposition party) Janez Janša and ministers of finance and economy in both governments: the late Andrej Bajuk and Andrej Vizjak in Janša’s administration as well as Franci Križanič and Matej Lahovnik in Pahor’s government. The kicker? The parliament adopted the report with a nearly 2/3 majority (59 votes out of 90), with no-none voting against.

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Gold Rush

In a development that surprised a grand total of zero people, Marjan Šarec, mayor of Kamnik and erstwhile presidential candidate announced yesterday that he will take part in the parliamentary election. This comes on the heels of a host of new political parties announced or already formed and ready to enter the already-crowded arena. And with the vote six months out it is high time pengovsky takes a closer look at the lay of the land .


Slovenian ballot box (photo by yours truly)

Although reguraly decried by their more established and/or traditional cousins as attempts to con and defraud the good citizens of Muddy Hollows, new parties are by no means a purely Slovenian phenomenon. Case in point Czech Republic (or Czechia, as it now wants to be called in English) where a large majority of parliamentary parties have yet to celebrate their tenth birthday and one was established only two years ago. Or neighbouring Slovakia where two parliamentary parties were non-existent as little as three or four years ago. Or even France, where the right wing is currently billed as Les Republicains but used various acronyms throughout the decades as its (originally Gaullist) platform evolved. All this and we haven’t even mentioned Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique En Marche which was but a figment of imagination as little as eighteen months ago but has since opened a can of whoop-ass on the French political establishment.

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Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum (Policy)

It takes a special sort of naiveté to look at the last ten days in Muddy Hollows and see it as anything but a shameless run for cheap political points. The matter at hand is the issue of one Ahmat Shani, a Syrian refugee who ended up in Slovenia where the state is refusing to process his asylum application and is now facing deportation to Croatia.


Ahmad Shami (source)

Ahmad Shami was a part of the 2015 refugee exodus which – despite numerous warning signs – caught the EU more or less unawares and scrambling for stop-gap solutions, hobbling the Schengen area and inducing levels of panic and overreaction not seen since, well, the eurozone crisis. But Ahmad Shami probably cared less about that than getting to safety and making sure his immediate family could follow in his footsteps.

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The Aftermath Of An Election

The ordeal is finally over. Borut Pahor was elected to a second five-year term, fending off a second-round challenge by Marjan Šarec, the mayor of a mid-size town in central Slovenia. But although Pahor’s victory was expected, he had to work harder and longer for it and won with by a much smaller margin that generally expected at the outset of the campaign.


The runner-up and the incumbent (source)

Still reeling from the clusterfuck after the first round when a number of of prominent polling agencies called the race for Pahor even ahead of the vote, the pollsters were more or less on target this time around. Most of final polls coalesced around 55/45 percent for Pahor but the final tally showed Pahor won in the end by 53 percent to Šarec’s 47 percent. That’s a mere six-point spread.

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