After about a month of Golob’s debacles, the media is still talking almost exclusively about the Janša government. But since this topic has been almost fully exhausted by now, their approaches to it are becoming more and more bizarre. The latest spin, which even the national media outlet, RTV Slovenia, tried to sell on its show “Dnevnik” (“Daily”), is that economic growth under Janša’s government was bad, even harmful, as we will receive less funding from Brussels as a result of it.
The editor of the radical left-wing weekly “Mladina” (“Youth”), Grega Repovž, wrote on Twitter that the economic growth during the time of the Janša government was actually just “stupid politics.” “Everyone will laugh at us because of this stupid politics of Janez Janša. You really have to be very dumb to do this to yourself.”
And though we can somehow manage to forgive the professional agitator, it is much more difficult to understand the public institution RTV Slovenia and the current Prime Minister Robert Golob, who are saying similarly bizarre things. As Albin Vrabič put it, “the left-wing propaganda on RTV Slovenia is becoming unbearable. It is systematically turning the globally outstanding economic results of the Janša government into something problematic. And Golob is perversely criticising these successes live. Unbelievable. And when it comes to commenting on this topic, they are deliberately ignoring the current opposition, as if it does not exist.”
Instead of RTV Slovenia protecting Golob and deciding not to report on such a debacle, journalist Mojca Širok even highlighted his statement on the main daily news show. The Prime Minister claims that “we were not paying enough attention to what is happening” and thus fell out of the group of countries that need more EU help.
According to the leading ideologues of the Slovenian left and even its leader, economic growth is nonsense, and the smart thing to do for politics is for the government to destroy the economy as much as possible and thus “optimise” the yield of Brussels cohesion funds. This is a way of thinking that is at the level of a full-time employee who has just been promoted but is now planning to quit their job and apply for financial assistance because he heard that unemployment benefits had increased significantly. By declaring war on the economy, lowering wages and raising taxes, Golob is preparing the terrain for us to be in the same group as Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania once again, instead of Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Andrej Žitnik
