Članek italijanskega novinarja o razmerah v Slo:
L’intervento della Corte costituzionale slovena, nella tarda mattinata di venerdì 17 aprile, non è s
www.eastjournal.net
SLOVENIA: The government is looking for "full powers" but the Constitutional Court is holding back
The
intervention of
the Slovenian Constitutional Court , in the late morning of Friday 17 April, was not a bolt of lightning, but marked the true
border line between Budapest and Ljubljana : between the "full powers" in Hungarian sauce and the state by right.
With its
verdict , in fact, the guarantee body sanctioned the
illegitimacy of the
decree adopted by the government to counter the
Covid-19 epidemic ,
in the part in which it does not establish a specific limit to its duration . This provision introduced rules very similar to those adopted by other countries, including Italy, which heavily affect various fundamental rights of citizens. The Court did not rule on the merits of these measures, but censored article 7, according to which it would have been the government to establish, with extreme vagueness, how long the various prohibitions remained in force.
This is an indicative signal, because it does not only demonstrate that the system of
weights and counterweights , in the transalpine republic, is still in good health, but confirms a bitter reality to Prime Minister
Janez Janša : in Slovenia you cannot do
what Viktor Orbán is doing doing in Hungary , not even during a crisis of the extent of this health emergency.
The context
The political situation started to become very hot last January 27th, when - with the timing of a
B-movie dystopian - the then Prime Minister
Marjan Šarec has resigned
resignation . Thus, his center-left minority government came to an end, with the prospect of an early return to the polls. The
new coronavirus was still perceived as a distant problem, to which WHO had not even assigned an official name.
The
consultations between the parties, however, take an unexpected turn precisely on the days when, just beyond the border, the first large outbreak of our continent is discovered.
Janša manages - with 29% of the seats in parliament obtained by her Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) - to
achieve the most classic of Italian flaps , thanks to the agreement with one of the main components of the previous government coalition: the Party of the modern center (SMC) of the previous premier Miro Cerar.
The SDS leader is not a new face in Slovenian politics: it is the
third time, in fact, that Janša manages to become prime minister, crowning a career that began well before the collapse of Yugoslavia and dotted with
various scandals . In recent years, however, he has distinguished himself above all by a
radical right turn , whose markedly
xenophobic, intolerant and nationalist message is constantly being amplified by
Nova24tv , the television network he founded and
foraged by
Hungary .
The alarm
Shortly before Easter, an
investigation by the journalist Blaž Zgaga - first published in the Croatian newspaper
Nacional , then in Italy by L'
Espresso - had also raised many concerns abroad about the
health of democracy in Slovenia. Not only did the author define a "coup" as an emergency management at the limits of the constitutional perimeter, but he also reported the disturbing infiltration, in
the Slovenian
security apparatuses , of elements close to
the Identity Movement : a network of far-right groups also involved in the
attack on the New Zealand mosque in Christchurch . For a very similar situation,
Austria, during the last brief experience of governing the far-right Fpö formation, had been effectively excluded from the exchange of information between western
intelligence agencies , with significant risks to national security.
The investigation also revealed fears about the government's plans to
extend police powers to the army - despite the opposition
missing the necessary qualified two-thirds majority - and a
call to arms for volunteers. A suspicious appeal, when there is no specific military threat, and that sounds more like a wink to the various anti-immigrant
paramilitary groups that already operated - on the margins of legality - until a few months ago on the border with Croatia.
***The government against everyone***
The
criticism by the
press and large slices of the Slovenian civil society have sparked a strong reaction from the government since its debut. In fact,
direct attacks on journalists and intellectuals such as the philosopher
Slavoj Žižek have continued .
Lunges launched not only via
social media , but also through more institutional channels, such as the
letter to the Council of Europe in which Foreign Minister
Anže Logar denounced,
in the growing embarrassment of the other majority parties, an alleged connection between independent media "Leftist" and the previous Yugoslav communist regime. An implicit reference to
Udbomafija's conspiracy theory that the post-communist
elites are still being
handled by the
titled secret police (UDBA).
It is therefore difficult to deny a worrying
trend towards authoritarianism on the part of the new Slovenian executive, but it should also be noted that
solid antibodies still exist which bode well for the democratic stability of the institutions. The
media , with the exception of the group controlled by the prime minister, have shown a considerable degree of
independence , and the same can be said for both the judiciary and the legislative powers. Rather, one has the impression that the ongoing institutional clashes have the main effect of
weakening the holding of the governing coalition , whose only real glue is the
Covid-19 emergency .