The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the latest institution to join the campaign of collecting signatures for the presidential candidate of the deep state. Namely, the Ministry has sent out a special diplomatic dispatch to its embassies to help collect signatures for just one candidate. Nataša Pirc Musar. A candidate who has received Kučan’s blessing, and thus the support of the bureaucratic apparatus of the deep state. Before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent out the dispatch, it was the Ministry of the Interior that had started collecting signatures for Pirc Musar, and in a letter, the Ministry of the Interior called on other ministries to join the campaign. Now, they are saying that this is not preferential treatment and that, if asked, they would do the same for other candidates. But one thing is clear, if Pirc Musar had enough “organic” support, to use the online jargon, she would not need ministries to collect signatures for her.
“We are forwarding the address for the forms of support for the candidacy of the candidate for President of the Republic of Slovenia,” reads the summary of the diplomatic dispatch, which was leaked online in the form of a screenshot. This was subsequently published by the leader of the opposition, Janez Janša, who commented on it by writing: “And now Slovenian diplomacy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have also engaged in the action of collecting signatures of support – but only for Kučan’s candidate Pirc Musar.”
So, here is what happened in the lead-up to this: on the 30th of August 2022, the Ministry of the Interior sent a special letter to all administrative units, the consular sector of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, explaining that they had received a request from Pirc Musar’s electoral staff to assist them in collecting signatures of support for the candidate by publishing in a public place the address where the candidate was collecting signatures. The letter also says that, at the request of the candidate’s team, the address should be published in all public institutions, hospitals, homes for the elderly and, of course, consular offices. Well, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems to have listened to their requests.
Why help only one candidate?
“It is absolutely clear that the competent authorities should publish on these sites and official portals the addresses of all the headquarters of the candidates’ teams that are collecting signatures, if they decided to publish one. Regardless of the “requests.” Musar’s address was published because she does not have enough signatures,” Janša also wrote, and in an earlier post, he even wrote that the whole matter was ripe for criminal charges. In the latest episode of the show “Tarča” (“Target”) on the national Radio-Television Slovenia, Pirc Musar herself admitted that she had not yet reached the number of 5,000 signatures required to file her candidacy.
Lots of neurosis on the left
The series of events that have taken place recently show that there is some uncertainty on the left about the outcome of the elections. First, after a series of revelations in the media, Marta Kos, the candidate of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda), has resigned in an apparent attempt by the left to consolidate the left electoral base, which would otherwise be further fragmented. The Slovenian Olympic Committee also got involved in the campaign, as it intended to organise a special tribute to the Slovenian Olympians in candidate Pirc Musar’s Russian Dacha house, but then cancelled the event under the weight of public pressure. After the sports engagement, the entire bureaucratic apparatus stepped in.
Andrej Žitnik
