“Since I do not want to make the godfathers from the Pečarič restaurant even angrier, I will not publish the full content of their document, but only a small part of it. There are 12 bullet points dedicated to Anže Logar and only three to Nataša Pirc Musar. The discrediting of Logar is built almost exclusively on a single argument, which for understandable reasons, at least half of Slovenia will respond to in an instant: Logar = Janša,” journalist and editor Dejan Steinbuch wrote about the document with instructions on how to report on the two presidential candidates we had before Sunday’s election – Nataša Pirc Musar and Anže Logar. Despite his caution, he apparently angered the godfathers and subsequently also published part of the instructions he received.
“Just a few days after the first round of presidential elections, some media outlets received a document, about one page long, with some kind of guidance, recommendations on how to direct the coverage on Nataša Pirc Musar and Anže Logar in the run-up to the second round of the elections. And how were they supposed to do it? In a way that would cause as little damage as possible to the female candidate and as much damage as possible to her opponent,” Dejan Steinbuch wrote in his recent column. He added that he was convinced that neither
Nataša Pirc Musar nor Anže Logar had anything to do with this because, according to him, the document was drawn up by the think-tank of the Pečarič restaurant, where the former President Kučan’s team had taken refuge after the collapse of the Zvezda confectionery shop. The editor of PortalPlus web portal recently tweeted that the “godfathers” sent him a response to the column: an attempted burglary while he was away.
On Sunday, Steinbuch published part of the “recommendations” from the document he mentioned in his column, which read: consistently highlighting Logar’s role in the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) – the feeling that Logar = Janša should be further highlighted; consistently highlighting that he did not oppose the controversial measures taken by former Prime Minister Janez Janša (the use of police force, punishing the opponents of the anti-corona measures, violence, the use of aggressive communication during the time of the previous government) – since Logar was Director of the Government Communication Office in the past, he knows how to communicate and should have interfered here, if he really is a democrat; highlighting his non-action when former Prime Minister published offensive tweets about foreign politics, which was Logar’s area of expertise – congratulating Trump and the likes; highlighting the fact that he was congratulated by Janša on his victory in the first round of the elections – emphasising that he is just the extension of Janša’s politics; highlighting the lack of action in the face of Janša’s controversial abusive tweets; highlighting Logar’s stance on abortion and same-sex couples’ adoptions; highlighting Logar’s position on the National Liberation Front and the Home Guards (here it is not yet clear what his stance really is – be careful); highlighting Logar’s political responsibility in the politicisation of the national media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia.
We have listed just a few of the instructions, but there were also warnings to avoid the subject of Ukraine because Logar is very strong here, and to avoid the area of foreign policy, so as not to raise Logar’s credentials. The instructions also highlight the importance of avoiding any mention of tax legislation – “as Nataša Pirc Musar has a partly similar stance here, but above all, this is her biggest problem due to tax optimisation.” It is fascinating just how precisely the instructions from the document mentioned above were then translated into the media landscape, which the author of the column had also noticed.
In the column, Steinbuch did not publish the instructions he received on how to report on the two presidential candidates (“Since I do not want to make the godfathers from the Pečarič restaurant even angrier, I will not publish the full content of their document,” he wrote) – but the attempted burglary seemed to have given him the motivation to publish more details of the instructions. However, he already wrote in the column that the instructions from the think-tank of the Pečarič restaurant turned out to be a litmus test for the utter servility, the mandarin attitude of the mainstream media towards the behind-the-scenes power centres – journalists and their editors copied the document verbatim and used it in their pre-election debates. It is logical that in 90 percent, the target was Anže Logar, but according to Steinbuch, it did not escape the attention of observers that this time even the most sophisticated and perfidious instructions could not hide the serious holes in the media image of Nataša Pirc Musar, who was – intentionally or unintentionally – defined in one of the
pre-election debates as the “candidate of the transitional capital” by Milan Brglez. Steinbuch also pointed out that the idea that this presidential election is about a clash of values is nonsense, as values were killed in this election the moment candidate Pirc Musar lied about her wealth.
“It is very likely that Nataša Pirc Musar will move into the Presidential Palace in a month’s time, despite the fact that she has withheld a bunch of important, relevant information from the public. The result could be very close, I predict that the difference will be less than five percent and would probably be different if the campaign had lasted another week or two,” Steinbuch predicted, explaining that Pirc Musar’s advantage had started to shrink in recent days, and the accounts of insincerity and concealment of her real assets had started to come back to bite her, like a boomerang.
“I believe that the old team of the former President was not aware of the rich collection of skeletons in the closet of the Pirc Musar family. How did they feel when Milan Brglez’s post-festum words about how she is ‘the candidate of the transitional capital’ were confirmed? It must have hurt. Because Nataša Pirc Musar represents everything that her godfathers, at least outwardly, reject and accept with reluctance as the acquisition of capitalism. A further humiliation came from Prime Minister Robert Golob, who, after the defeat in the first round, politically adopted Nataša Pirc Musar and clustered the bulk of the coalition around her (with the exception of the Left party – Levica, which cannot support her as it would betray all its principles in doing so). The think-tank of the Pečarič restaurant no longer has any special love for Golob after he publicly ridiculed the former President twice, as he sold out the candidate of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda), Marta Kos. With his subsequent actions and personnel moves, Golob proved himself to be selfish, disobedient and, above all, ungrateful. They will not forgive him for that, but the question is whether that even means anything anymore because, at the moment, the ‘Sun King’ holds all the power, and no one can do much to him. The worst shock would be if it turned out – and I think we are well on the way there – that this was another disastrous flop by the old guard, which, after Golob, has already misjudged and wrongly profiled another person for the highest office in the country. If this were a recruitment agency making such mistakes, the former President’s team would have been fired yesterday. In less than a year, they have missed the mark twice already… phew… That is very telling. Even in medical terms,” Steinbuch wrote in his column.
Sara Bertoncelj
