“For me, this interpellation has brought two big shocks. The first shock was that the Prime Minister was talking about the inflation rate and quoting old figures that are no longer true, saying that we have the lowest inflation rate among the countries in our area, which is simply not true,” former Prime Minister Janez Janša said on this week’s episode of the show “Arena” on Radio-Television Slovenia, explaining that this is a key macroeconomic figure that Prime Minister Robert Golob should really know – “it’s the same as a mother not knowing how many children she has,” Janša explained.
Exactly a year has passed since the parliamentary elections, and to mark the anniversary, the host of the show “Arena” on RTV Slovenia invited the leader of the opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) and former Prime Minister Janez Janša and the current Prime Minister Robert Golob to the studio. The latter declined the invitation. This is not the first time he has done so, but it seems rather inappropriate of a Prime Minister to refuse an invitation linked to the position he occupies. In response to this, Janša mentioned that politics is a public matter, after all, and that if POP TV had invited Golob to come on one of their shows, he might have responded to the invitation.
Despite the many promises made by the current government this year, practically nothing has materialised. That is why the government has decided to “promise not to make promises anymore – instead, they will just surprise us with what has already been done,” which, in Janša’s opinion, is also not right, since a politician is obliged to announce upcoming and planned measures. Janša pointed out that the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje svoboda) has a great “luxury” in the coalition, which Janša could not afford during his term in office, “namely, the party could govern practically on its own,” he said, explaining that “it is this comfort that allows time for reflection and thoughtful action on certain issues.” Janša explained that the interpellation was also intended precisely to keep them in parliament longer than just until 3 p.m. and to give them time to think. “First, they said that the interpellation was irrelevant, and then those same people were the ones who talked the most,” he said.
Golob’s criticism of Janša at the time of the interpellation was that the former Prime Minister spends 80 percent of his time focusing and dealing with the past, but only 2 percent thinking about healthcare, and even less time dealing with the future, while they are more focused on the future. “Unfortunately, it was actually the current Prime Minister who was more focused on the past – when we talked about inflation, he didn’t even know the data from the present. He knew data from the past months but not the last measured inflation, and that was the biggest shock. For me, this interpellation has brought two big shocks. The first shock was that the Prime Minister was talking about the inflation rate and quoting old figures that are no longer true, saying that we have the lowest inflation rate among the countries in our area, which is simply not true,” Janša said, explaining that this is a key macroeconomic figure that he should know – “it’s the same as a mother not knowing how many children she has,” Janša explained.
The second shock that Janša pointed out was that Golob claimed that the price of food had fallen by almost 25 percent since September last year, “and then the Minister of Agriculture was unable to explain how it was possible that the Minister of Finance was claiming that the main generator of inflation was the rise in prices, when in the meantime food had become cheaper, and I asked her myself to explain it, and she was unable to explain it,” Janša said.
Janša: nothing will come of the tax reform because they should tax themselves first
According to the host of the show, Golob’s coalition has said of the tax reform that it will “take care of those who have less and take away from those who can contribute more, while claiming that some are afraid for the privileged,” with Pirkovič suggesting that this remark is directed at Janša. “The Prime Minister and the majority of the government belong to this minority, they come from this privileged stratum,” said Janša, who had already warned some time ago that nothing would come of the proposed tax reform, because members of the coalition would have to tax themselves first, he explained, and went on to say that it was shocking to see, even from the mainstream media, that the day after the interpellation, no one was even talking about the fact that “the Prime Minister does not know what the inflation rate is in Slovenia, and the Minister of Agriculture cannot explain how it is possible that the prices of food have gone up by 20 percent, while supposedly, the prices of all the most important food items (which are being monitored) have gone down by 35 percent,” the former Prime Minister was astonished, pointing out that in any other country, the government would fall the next day in the face of such nonsense.
Janša: Independent Slovenia was not established so that today, people could bring back this criminal ideology
“When Slovenia became independent, it broke off from, broke away from a regime, the characteristic feature of which was the rule of one party, which was created in the village of Čebine. At the same time as the debate in the interpellation, where one of the topics was the abolition of the Museum of Independence, the Minister of Culture went to Čebine as an official representative of the government, not as a private citizen, as was officially reported, to celebrate the beginning of a totalitarian state from which we had separated on the 26th of June 2004. We did not work for and defend an independent Slovenia and put it on its feet and voted for it on the one vote where the Slovenian nation wrote its own judgement, so that today, some people would be able to bring back that criminal ideology and do that in the name of the government.” Given that neither the Prime Minister nor anyone else in this government has spoken out against this action by the Minister of Culture, it can be concluded that Slovenia is not an intimate option for any of them, according to Janša. “Imagine if the Minister of Culture of the German government went to celebrate the founding of the NSDAP, Hitler’s Nazi party,” Janša said, stressing that Slovenia is lucky that no one is watching and that the mainstream media is keeping quiet about all of this.
One of the goals of the current government is to strengthen trust in the rule of law, working with civil society, and Pirkovič spoke about the fines issued during the pandemic. “I am not only concerned about this specific behaviour, I am also concerned about the message that if you protest against a government and then the elections take the said government away, and another government comes in, the next government undoes and cancels all these offences. That is to say, when the next government comes in, it will be able to look at all the traffic fines and other offences committed during the mandate of the previous government, decide that the issuing of these fines was not appropriate, pass a law and give the money back to the offenders,” Janša explained this absurdity of the current government, explaining that this is “evil” and that his governments have never done this in their three mandates, but there is no guarantee that none of the future governments will do this. “A new government comes in at the next election, some quasi-civil society makes some legal scrap and repeals all the measures of the previous government with one law, then within two months you replace all the people they put in place, you go down the list, you look at the dates, as they did, and you replace them, unless they are from the New Slovenia party (Nova Slovenija – NSi), and you say, that’s what Freedom is now. That’s not freedom, that is vile revanchism,” Janša explained.
Janša: my vision is tied to the future of children in Slovenia
On his plans for the future and whether he intends to become prime minister again, Janša replies that his “vision is tied to the kind of Slovenia he wants for his children, and he has been working for this since the very time he entered politics”, the former Prime Minister was clear. Pirkovič mentions that it will be difficult for the centre-right to build anything in the future if it is fragmented, but Janša thinks that this is “a question for the party which has eight of its member in the National Assembly but have taken all the controlling functions that belong to the opposition, even though there is also a party in the National Assembly, which has 27 MPs, to whom these positions belong”, Janša explained, adding that there had never been a problem with this in the past and that they even gave the New Slovenia party one of these positions themselves, while now they had immediately grabbed all the supervisory positions. “In the role it is in now, New Slovenia is not an alternative for the right-wing voters,” Janša was clear.
Tanja Brkić
