The recent storms and flooding devastated and practically submerged Slovenia underwater. However, if the left had not tanked Vizjak’s law, the consequences might have been less severe. Leftists vacationed; rightists came to the aid of the flood victims. The flooding exposed the conspiracy around the safety of the C0 canal.
The first weekend in August, Slovenia was devastated by the worst storms in its history. Heavy rainfall caused flooding and triggered numerous landslides. Two-thirds of the country was affected, with particularly severe floods in the Koroška and Savinjska valleys, as well as in the Gorenjska, central Slovenia, Pomurje and North Primorska regions. The rainfall eased on Sunday, but floods and landslides continued to ravage the country. Many roads were closed, rail transport was disrupted, and thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes.
A law that would have lessened the damage was scrapped two years ago
It is, of course, impossible to prevent such a rampage of nature, but it is possible to at least lessen the damage by taking preventive measures. In 2021, the then-government of Janez Janša drafted a law whose main purpose was to regulate flood safety. As Minister Andrej Vizjak, whose Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning drafted the law, said:
“The main purpose for which we at the Ministry drafted the amendments to the Water Act was to ensure better flood safety, to make life easier for all people living in flood-prone areas, i.e., all those whose lives and property may be at risk in a flood. If the law is supported in Sunday’s referendum, we will be able to provide much-needed additional funding for the management and maintenance of watercourses. This will give many people a sense of relief when the next floods come. Many households will no longer tremble in the face of rising waters.”
However, the leftist godfathers from the background decided to use this law as a means to bring down the Janša government. Of course, they did not expose themselves, but chose the obscure non-governmental organisation, the 8th of March Institute (Inštitut 8. marec), to play the role of the useful idiot and expose themselves in this political conflict. Their choice is no coincidence because, in recent years, the left in Western countries generally likes to use women, especially younger women, so that they can accuse their opponents of being violent, and so they can claim that men are picking on women. The 8th of March Institute announced the referendum on the Water Act, and the godfathers from the background prepared the support of their network on the ground and of all the major media they control, and, to top it all off, lied, saying that the fate of drinking water was at stake. This slogan, which the left-wing media spouted day and night, persuaded the citizens to overturn the law in the referendum with an overwhelming majority of 86.75 percent of the vote. Although the Janša government did not fall, the left celebrated, but the people whose property was destroyed by the water in recent days were the ones who got the short end of the stick.
The blatant ignorance of the Golob government
In the meantime, the left came to power, and the new government did nothing to draft a new law to improve flood safety. This, of course, proves that the left cares little about people and their safety, because it scrapped the law purely for political reasons. Or, as Miran Videtič wrote on social media these days:
“The rain will stop at some point, hard-working people will restore their houses, sheds, garages, their gardens will come back to life, bridges will connect the riverbanks again… But we will still be without laws, without a strategy on how to be prepared for the next heavy rainfall. I understand the political fight, I understand the ‘drinking’ after the referendum victory, the media hype, the prizes… What I don’t understand is why you would tear something down and then not offer a better solution, a law! Immediately! You leave the people to fend against the next rain, the next storm! And then you are ‘with them in spirit’! In the meantime, you fuck up a bit and tell the firemen, the doctors to fuck off… but they’ll be the first to jump when the situation goes to shit. Corrupt to the extreme.”
And indeed, the Golob government has shown in the year it has been in power that it does not care about flood safety, fire safety, border security, doctors, patients, firefighters, pensioners or anyone else. All they care about is the media, NGOs and Golob’s cronies in the energy sector – and a few of their petty personal projects, like the nutria. There is enough money for that; Golob secured half a billion euros for his cronies in the energy sector without a hitch, and he has also secured heavy millions for NGOs, but for everything else, money has supposedly run out. Perhaps there will be money at some point in the future, after they have taxed the citizens a little more. The level of ignorant behaviour of the Prime Minister is so high that he does not even give a damn about the European Union funds, not even the ones that have already been agreed upon and are practically lying under his nose. Just a month before the storm, he cancelled some 160 million euros that had already been agreed on, specifically for flood safety. And even though meteorologists had been forecasting extremely heavy rainfall for a whole week before the actual floods, the Prime Minister nonchalantly snuck off to a holiday abroad.
In the meantime, Slovenia was hit by a storm, and it took the Prime Minister two whole days to decide that he might just break his holiday and take charge of the disaster and its aftermath, as is his duty. However, he is grossly inept at this, as he proved last year with the fire in the Karst region. And besides, what can one expect from a Prime Minister who, whenever there is a problem, comes out with a timetable that puts the solution to the problem somewhere in the future, which is, in fact, a bluff attempt to hide the fact that he has no idea how to actually tackle the problem?
Trolls in defence of the government
People whose homes were flooded or who barely managed to save themselves from the flood naturally had enough, and criticism poured in against the government and those who helped tank Vizjak’s law, primarily the 8th of March Institute. On the government’s side, the only thing that seems to be working is its army of trolls who have tried to limit the damage. Not flood damage, but political damage. Instead, it was the right-wing opposition that has actively been trying to limit the flood damage. Thus, hundreds of Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) members, including the party’s president Janez Janša, but also some other patriotic groups and organisations, came to the aid of our fellow citizens affected by the floods.
In the meantime, for example, members of the 8th of March Institute have been lounging around on their “well-deserved leaves”, occasionally threatening to sue anyone who dares to criticise them for their role in the demolition of Vizjak’s law and the consequences that have come about because of it. The pro-government trolls, however, have, as I have already mentioned, flooded the social networks with accusations that the right-wing is only concerned with promoting itself by helping the flood victims, and with accusations that drawing attention to the consequences of the referendum is an exploitation of the disaster for political purposes. When should the consequences of a misguided policy be pointed out, if not when they occur?
The left-wing trolls have also tried to minimise the responsibility of those that ensured that Vizjak’s law was not adopted, saying that there would not have been enough time to implement all the flood protection measures anyway. This is true, but at least some of them could have been completed in two years, which would have reduced the extent of the damage, and there would have been some money already accumulated in the reconstruction fund, which would have been immediately available to the victims of the floods.
There is also no shortage of calls from left-wing trolls on the Internet, who are suddenly hypocritically calling for unity. Tomaž Štih has made a great comment about this, writing:
“In the coming days, the media will be full of calls for solidarity and unity, and we will probably also see some charity events with Nataša Pirc Musar or Tina Gaber as a sponsor.
Two things are important to remember in this situation.
- That solidarity is intended for the people affected by the floods, not for the authorities and their apparatchiks.
- That Slovenia has a chronic problem of lack of accountability. In fact, we have examples that show what can be done. For example, the restored retention basin behind Rožnik and the widening of the riverbed of Mali Graben have held up during the floods. And part of Ljubljana is dry as a result. Who is to blame for the fact that we have politically wrecked so many initiatives? You know what? In theory, at least, someone IS to blame. And if nothing else, we can at least stop listening to the spoilt little daughters of Ljubljana’s red elites and see politics a little more maturely.
Luka Lisjak wrote in the Delo newspaper that the future caught up with us. No, it was not the future that has caught up with us, but instead the past. It is impossible to save everything from a once-in-a-hundred-years flood. But there is much more to be done than what we have actually done so far. It is what we did not do, but could have done that caught up with us. And it is not fucking paper straws and solar panels!”
The court experts’ claims were wrong
But the storm has exposed another fallacy, namely around Ljubljana’s C0 sewage canal, publicly dubbed “Janković’s shit pipeline”. The mayor’s court experts vehemently replied to all warnings about the safety of this pipeline, which is supposed to run through the main drinking water catchment area for the capital, that there was no reason to panic. That everything is oh-so-safe. That even in the worst downpour, the pipes will never be more than 40 percent full. Well, in the last storm, water was gushing out of pipes that are not even carrying sewage yet, all along the route. If the pipeline had been in full operation, shit would have been flying out all along the route and flooding all the surrounding land. And, of course, it would also contaminate the groundwater. Janković has been saying that we are no longer used to such amounts of water, but even if that were true, what does it matter if there is a chance that the pipeline could flood as it did last weekend. On top of that, there is the strong possibility that the push of the water, which flooded the pipes from all sides, damaged the joints, which the pipeline’s opponents were already pointing out as a weak point anyway, saying that the contractors had sloppily assembled the pipes. This means that, in all likelihood, the pipeline is already damaged. And it does not help if it is in concrete duct channels – This means that the pipeline is most likely already damaged. And it doesn’t help if it is in a concrete duct channel – those who have had the misfortune of experiencing a pipe burst in their flat before know that water eventually breaks through concrete, however thick, so Ljubljana faces a disaster if the damaged pipeline is put into service. The whole route would have to be dug up, and ALL the joints would need to be checked, but Janković will almost certainly not do that. That is why it is now more necessary than ever to put pressure on all the authorities to stop the project and prevent a sanitary catastrophe in the capital.
Bogdan Sajovic
