“A serious and insurmountable problem has arisen for Marta Kos,” believes the university professor and political commentator Boštjan M. Turk. He was commenting on what he considered to be the illogical candidacy of Marta Kos, especially given the fact that she was an alleged collaborator of the secret political police in the past. He believes that she will have to face reality, but stressed that making the letter from the President of the EU Commission public is also a must for the correctness of the appointment procedure.
According to Boštjan M. Turk, the career background of European Commissioner-designate Marta Kos is extremely “sensitive for Central Europe and the Eastern area, which was influenced by the Soviet Union, where practices of cooperation with the totalitarian system or its political police were very common. In the West, this is less understood, or understood only by specialists in these things. It is a “stroke of luck” that Germany is the main pillar of the European Union, in terms of population and everything else,” he said in his introduction.
“So, a serious problem arose for Marta Kos when, on Thursday, the Visegrad24 profile on X posted that entry, because it is one of the most influential news websites in the whole of Europe, it has an incredible number of followers,” he said. He believes that Kos will not be able to compensate for this problem and that it is easy to predict that many questions will be raised on this topic, as he himself predicted on his X profile. At the same time, he also mentioned the questions that would be raised by the fact that Marta Kos was also in the company of the illegal migrant smuggler and alleged rapist Mustafa Alnajjar in the photographs from the electoral headquarters of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda).
Her former party is anti-European
All of the above raises questions about her personality, but our interlocutor also believes that Kos has “no qualifications” to be the European Commissioner, as the party to which she belonged is, in his view, pro-Balkan and anti-European. “The values – in quotation marks – promoted by the so-called Freedom Movement party are all anti-European. They are values that are directed against the principle of the free market, against the market economy, they are essentially socialist values, like those of Mussolini, for example, who had this strict patronage of the state economy, the monopolies. They want to create a so-called new class, to which everyone from President Nataša Pirc Musar to Prime Minister Robert Golob belongs,” he explained, adding that this is also what he wrote about in his latest book, The Prisoners of Freedom (Jetniki Svobode).
According to Turk, this candidacy is “ipso facto a profound logical absurdity,” he noted, recalling that even when Kos had the opportunity to serve as State Commissioner representing interests in a wider area of the European Union, this resulted in her dismissal due to mobbing. He believes that all these issues should have been well articulated at the time of her hearing and insisted upon in the event that she had been accepted. Even if the Slovenian mainstream media and the post-transition cadres would consider it normal for someone who – as the media outlet Požareport wrote – was a confidante of the secret political police to run for this post, there are tens of millions of people in Europe who find this absolutely controversial, Turk believes.
“The Visegrad countries, the Baltic States and East Germany solved this issue in 1990, but it is not solved here in 2024, and the question is if it ever will be,” he pointed out.
Turk believes that Marta Kos is about to face the reality of her political career, which includes, of course, her involvement with the secret political police, pointing out that experts in this field should dig into the archives in Zagreb or Belgrade to find out exactly what her role was and for how long she played it. He believes that Milan Kučan, the last President of the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Slovenia, played a major role in her nomination, and that it was perhaps this role which he saw as an “advantage” or something positive in the development of her career axis. As for the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, who in his view should be the solution but is, in fact, a distraction, it would not have surprised Turk if she were not bothered at all by Kos’s past.
We have lost that, and the consequences are terrible
Turk sees huge progress both in Slovenia and in modern Europe, but in his view, things are not as they should be, mainly because “we have lost continuity” and “the authority of the political class” in Brussels and in Western Europe, and one of the consequences of this is also the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen.
It is difficult to comment on the actual influence of the President of the European Commission on Slovenia, as the alleged letter sent by von der Leyen has not yet been seen by the public. Turk pointed out that the public urgently needs to see this letter, as it is the only way to dispel doubts about the correctness of the new EU Commissioner nomination procedure.
Von der Leyen’s alleged request has no basis and is contrary to the Lisbon Treaty
“As long as there is no letter saying something that absolutely disqualifies Tomaž Vesel from the post of European Commissioner, no one can do anything, but if the former is the case, then that is an absolute violation of the procedure,” he said, adding that von der Leyen’s alleged demand for a women’s quota also has no basis, least of all in the EU Constitution or the Lisbon Treaty. Turk has repeatedly pointed out in the past that what we have seen in the EU is the implementation of three elements that have nothing to do with the EU’s supreme document, the Lisbon Treaty. The centre of interests pursued by the current European Commission is reflected in the three points that the Brussels authorities wanted to enforce at all costs. These are the so-called green transition, the continued admission of illegal economic migrants, and the LGBT+ strand. There is no basis for any of this in the Treaty of Lisbon, which is logical. It was drafted at a time when Europe was still normal.
“The development of the European Union and the key points of its deterioration are in direct contradiction with its highest document, including the women’s quota, and this is far-fetched,” Turk concluded.
