Exit, Cerar

As the parliament started its weekly session today and is preparing for tomorrow’s vote on Janez Janša’s PM bid, the soon-to-be-ex foreign minister Miro Cerar announced he is leaving the SMC, the party that he formed back in 2014 and that for a while bore his name.

Miro Cerar delivering his statement today (source)

In a strongly-worded statement Cerar said this is no longer his party, nor is this the party he formed and added it had lost all credibility. Taking a direct swipe at the party’s MPs, he said that they “forgot who elected them“.

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Commissioner of Last Resort

Janez Lenačič, the (current?) Slovenian nominee for commissioner in the upcoming European Commission, had his first hearing in the Slovenian parliament yesterday. As the nomination process is wholly within the government purview, the parliamentary hearing is mostly a dog-and-pony show, intended to appease the grandstanding urges of MPs. Nevertheless, the non-binding vote finally brought to an end to the latest case study in how not to manage human resources.

Marjan Šarec (left) and Janez Lenarčič (source)

To say that the entire episode was a shitshow deluxe would be a bit of an understatement. It is incredibly ironic how PM Marjan Šarec was ever so vocal about the bizarre spectacle of shambolic commissioner nomination Muddy Hollows endured in 2014 and yet ended up pretty much in the same place Alenka Bratušek and later Miro Cerar ended up in five years ago.

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Trial Balloons

In the post-EU-election hustle some member states are hitting the ground running. Some, however, are not. No points for guessing which category Muddy Hollows is in.

Marjan Šarec and his weird-ish relationship with the EU (source and source)

In fact, rather than defining strategic areas of interest early on and then finding one or more people potentially fitting the bill, the great Slovenian political minds of Dunning-Kruger fame started playing a game of elimination and floating trial balloons. Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight.

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Jeremy Hunt For The Red October

Not a lot seems to be going right for British diplomacy these days. At least as far Muddy Hollows is concerned.

Jeremy Hunt and Karl Erjavec Miro Cerar (source)

Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs was in town today, talking shop and Brexit with his Slovenian counterpart the other day. And staying true to form, Jeremy Hunt stepped right into it.

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Life Imitating Art Imitating Life

With the last of the committee hearings slowly drawing to a close, the newly-minted Slovenian PM Marjan Šarec will submit his entire cabinet for parliamentary approval later this week and presumably get his government up and running. Thus a protracted three-month episode which culminated in a five-member coalition and a minority government, supported by the left-most party in the parliament, will finally come to an end. But, in the words of the worst British finance minister of the 20th century, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of an end. But it is, perhaps, an end of a beginning.


Marjan Šarec impersonating a PM (left) and being one. (source and source)

While this blog was mum due to vacay, pengovsky did a few media appearances on the coalition clusterfuck. Financial Times, The Europeans podcast and The Economist were among the victims (although, to the latter’s credit, apparently my bit got edited out). N1, a Croatian private news network, even had their viewers endure a 15-minute interview where yours truly bumbles along in Croatian. The gist of all this attention was two-fold: how come Janez Janša didn’t get to be PM and how come Šarec did?

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