On Friday, at the 40th Slovenian Book Fair, a conversation with the President of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), Janez Janša, was held on the occasion of the publication of his new book, The Wake-up Call (Budnica). Janša stressed that a wake-up call is needed for change in the country. In the conversation, he again criticised the functioning of the Slovenian judiciary, which, in his opinion, needs reform.
The book is an anthology of Janša’s writings and speeches between April 2022 and November 2024, in which he analyses events during this period. He urges that people whose freedom is restricted by the authorities must not give in to despair, but must act. In his words, the situation has simply gone too far in our country. “When the wake-up call is loud enough, change will come,” he believes.
The transition is not complete, and the judiciary is rotten
Janša reiterated that the transition in Slovenia from the previous system to a democratic one is not complete, and as a direct consequence, some of the country’s sub-systems are unreformed. In this context, he highlighted and reiterated his criticism of the judiciary, where he sees clientelism, and in part of the judiciary, “the higher you go, the more rotten it is”.
And despite the criticism he has received for his words in the past few days, he repeated: “If you call the Slovenian criminal justice system a mafia, it is an insult to the mafia,” and even received applause from the audience for this statement. “So, a wake-up call is also needed in the sense that we have to realise that things that have not been done have to be done once,” he said.
He was also once again critical of the police officers, who, armed but in plain clothes, were “harassing people” at a rally of his supporters in front of the Celje court, while there are apparently not enough police officers available to protect witnesses.
He was also very critical of the national media outlet, Radio-Television Slovenia (RTVS).
Every vote is a path to change
“Not everything that is sold as democratic, or that is created under certain postulates of parliamentary democracy, is actually democratic,” Janša added. At the same time, he believes that a lot can be done between now and the elections. “Everything can be done, every vote that is gained is a path to change, and the fundamental result of the wake-up call has to be that there are more and more of us – and I think there are more and more of us,” he told the gathering.
The last elections to the European Parliament also proved that anything is possible. “In this year’s elections to the European Parliament, we won four seats, more than all the government parties combined, with all the money, with all the power, with all the media backing them, with all the support, with all the manipulation, with a turnout that was far above average.”
At the same time, Janša also believes that the claim that the government and the opposition are the same, that we need something new, is starting to be brought up again. “This trick has been used so many times before that I hope it will no longer hold, but if it does again, the price will be even higher,” Janša believes.
C. Š.
