“This is the Party of Alenka Bratušek’s tactic for the election campaign – they covered up our posters with a candidate who is not even from our constituency. So far, we have found five poster sites where this has happened. This is not a sign of bravery and reliability but of corruption! And it will not help them. The bill is coming on the 24th of April,” warned Dominik Štrakl, an MP candidate from the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), whose posters were covered with those of the Party of Alenka Bratušek (Stranka Alenke Bratušek – SAB). Other deputies are now worried about their posters being covered up as well, which is why another SDS candidate, Maruša Babnik, came up with an interesting solution. She secured her posters by placing them on surfaces that are high to reach. “Sometimes you need to fence off something or put it someplace higher so that the ‘children’ cannot reach it,” she wrote.
The election campaign has so far revealed many interesting things in pre-election discussions and even more on the ground. The closer the election, the more the culture of political candidates is revealed. The left-wing parties are engaging in an unfair and dirty campaign, as in most cases, the posters of the SDS party are the ones that are being destroyed or covered over. The leftists like to emphasise the importance of media freedom, but on the other hand, they do not support healthy competition.
For example, Denis Sarkić, a public relations expert from the Social Democrats party (Socialni demokrati – SD), had a pretty foul response to what was going on with SDS’s posters. “The response of the people to the yellow-blue colour. We will put an end to this colour on the 24th of April,” he wrote on Twitter. However, with his post, Sarkić inadvertently confessed that he is also one of the people responsible for the posters being smeared all over with paint. Prime Minister and President of the SDS party, Janez Janša, said that they now know what the President of the SD party, Tanja Fajon, meant when she said that the work of their party will be “different” from now on. “They will smear paint on posters. When an SD party official brags about his own hooliganism… If the members of the SD party are not able to carry out its own positive campaign, you should at least refrain from destroying foreign property,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, the SD party is not the only one that praised the smeared posters. The frontman of Fridays’ anti-government protests, who did not manage to bring down Janša’s government in the last two years, Jaša Jenull, did the same. “Congratulations to SDS – the Slovenian Democratic Party! Even though you suppress the freedom of expression in protests, at least you encourage it with your posters! Spend all of your forints on jumbo posters; the people will not run out of spray paint! Rebellion on all fronts until the 24th of April and then victory over Janša!” Jenull wrote, referring to posters of the SDS party, onto which people wrote other words in order to change their meaning.
The leftists also “reimagined” the poster of the Minister of the Interior and SDS MP candidate, Aleš Hojs, and smeared black paint all over it. The created “mosaic” was also quite similar to the “artwork” we saw earlier in the mandate at the Ministry of Culture. The building of the Slovenian National Party (Slovenska nacionalna stranka – SNS) was also vandalised in a similar way. The leftists’ works of art also include swastikas, which they have also painted on Alenka Forte‘s outpatient clinic in the past. “Putinist methods in my native Škofja Loka as well. Vicious, and above all, very sad,” said MP candidate Andrej Hoivik, the vice-president of the Slovenian Democratic Youth – Slovenska demokratska mladina, SDM (the youth wing of the SDS party), when he saw his own poster had been “decorated” with swastikas.
The SAB party has a slightly different strategy
IN the past, we have noticed during campaigns that candidates pasted their own posters over the posters of their opponents. It took a while for this to happen during the current campaign, but finally, the SAB party started doing it. President of the SDM and SDS’s candidate for the position of MP, Dominik Štrakl, revealed how the supporters of the SAB party are pasting their own posters over his, but the posters show a candidate who is not running in the same constituency as Štrakl at all.
Namely, they are putting up posters of the SAB candidate from Murska Sobota, Klavdija Grkman, who is actually running in the Ptuj constituency. “This is the Party of Alenka Bratušek’s tactic for the election campaign – they covered up our posters with a candidate who is not even from our constituency. So far, we have found five poster sites where this has happened. This is not a sign of bravery and reliability but of corruption! And it will not help them. The bill is coming on the 24th of April,” Štrakl pointed out.
Meanwhile, SDS candidate Maruša Babnik came up with a clever solution for such stupid actions of the leftists. She placed her posters high enough so that no one can reach them. “Sometimes you need to fence off something or put it someplace higher so that the ‘children’ cannot reach it,” she jokingly wrote.
Sara Kovač
