A couple of days ago, some mainstream media outlets published the news that the current president of the Management Board of the GEN-I company, Robert Golob, is preparing a public forum, which will show the first outlines of the new party.
The organiser of the tribune is supposedly the movement or association that is still being established, called “Be the change” (Bodi sprememba) (this name is also used by a psychotherapist from the Upper Savinja Valley, but the two are probably unrelated). The public forum in question will allegedly be dedicated to talks about the future of our country, or better yet, talks about how to “normalise” life in Slovenia. Representatives of the left have been talking about the supposed “normalisation” – meaning, Slovenia’s return to the old transition tracks, where the plundering and exploitation of citizens can continue – for a long time now. Representatives of the so-called Constitutional Arch Coalition, who are actually members of the left-wing part of the current opposition, had already shown us what they consider normalisation when they opposed a reduction of the tax burden on wages and even threatened with a referendum.
What does Kučan see as the “normalisation of Slovenia?”
Milan Kučan, the last head of the Communist Party in Slovenia, also said something similar on Wednesday, at the inauguration of Dušan Semolič at the Forum for the Elderly of the SD party, who nonchalantly announced that next year, elections will be held, “which will decide on whether Slovenia will manage to move in the right, democratic direction, or instead turn to a dictatorship.” He also said that the opposition should “do everything in its power to stop the harmful, illegal and unconstitutional activities of this government, which is led by the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS).” Kučan is also worried that lately, “there has been a large number of parties concentrating in the middle of the political spectrum, which is not actually the middle.” It is therefore obvious that Kučan was bothered by certain centrist initiatives, such as the coalition of “Let’s Connect Slovenia” (Povežimo Slovenijo). Although he made it clear at the recent forum that he is counting on the legal successor of the Communist Party, which he once led himself – that is, the SD party – to connect and unite the centre-left parties, there is no doubt that he is also working on the project of a party that would bring the votes of the centrist electorate into the arms of the Constitutional Arch Coalition. And Robert Golob‘s new party is exactly this type of party – it is what the LDS, Zares, Positive Slovenia, the Party of Miro Cerar, and the LMŠ party had all been in the past.
Using the tried-and-true methods of conquering the political terrain
All of the answers to the question of what this new party will look like are pretty evident from the fact that, in addition to Luka Jazbec, the president of the emerging association, who is also an international businessman and apparently also Golob’s man from the GEN-I company, the other person to moderate the upcoming forum will be the infamous journalist Primož Cirman from the “Uncensored” (Necenzurirano) web portal, which is funded by the tycoon Martin Odlazek‘s media-garbage empire. In addition to Robert Golob, the forum will also include the infamous “whistleblower” Ivan Gale, president of the Court of Audit, Tomaž Vesel, and Dragan Petrovec, who described the protesters, who were gathering in front of the court years ago, as rabble.
The remaining speakers at the forum are Mirta Koželj, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, and Barbara Čenčur Curk, a professor at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering of the University of Ljubljana, who got very engaged in political activism this year, as an opponent of the amendment to the Water Act, which then fell at the referendum.
However, at least two things in this situation are very telling, namely, the way in which the godfathers of the new party set out to gradually conquer the media and political space. As we have already mentioned, an association is now being set up. And let us remind you that in 2007, a group of MPs from the crumbling LDS party, under the leadership of Gregor Golobič, founded the “Zares association,” which was later transformed into a party. And the model of a kind of “starting” public forum, which is supposed to be a kind of civil society platform for the new party, was borrowed from the Assembly of the Republic, which prepared the founding public forum in 2004, which stimulated great public interest and therefore contributed to the victory of the Slovenian spring in the elections of the same year.
So, what is the goal of the party that is being created?
We can talk about two basic goals of the new party – since the Constitutional Arch Coalition parties will not be able to win a majority, in a proportional system, where the government team is selected by the party that gets the relative majority, the new party will try to take as many votes as possible away from the middle and mobilise even more voters, and at the same time take away the votes that would otherwise go to the SDS and NSi parties and the parties of the Let’s Connect Slovenia coalition. If the new party managed to win a relative majority, a new coalition with the Constitutional Arch Coalition parties would almost certainly be formed, which means that the goal of the godfathers from the background would finally be fulfilled. We should also point out their technique of neutralising the votes in the centre-right by promoting anti-vaccination resentment, which means that lots of potential voters of the right-wing parties would stay at home and not go to the polls. Among the Constitutional Arch Coalition’s possible new partners, the new ecological party of the infamous Jure Leben is also being mentioned.
In his political career, Golob was the vice-president of the Positive Slovenia party and the president of the SAB council
It should also be pointed out that Robert Golob, who comes from the coastal region, is not actually a “new face”, despite the fact that he mostly worked in the economy. He received his doctorate at the age of 27 and became an assistant professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. In 1999, as a young politician from the LDS party, he already became the State Secretary at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, when the ministry was headed by Tea Petrin, who succeeded Metod Dragonja in the then-government. After the elections in 2000 and the departure of Bajuk’s government, during which the Ministry of Economic Affairs was being headed by the now-deceased Jože Zagožen, Petrin returned to the ministry once again, and Golob came with her. Petrin remained a minister in the last Drnovšek government and then also in Rop’s government, but she did not manage to last until the elections but resigned (she was succeeded by Matej Lahovnik) and then decided to continue her career in the diplomatic waters.
Golob then became the State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning, where he was responsible for the field of energy, and in his career as a State Secretary, he chaired the supervisory boards of as many as five institutions: Eles, Elektro Ljubljana, HSE, Borzen, and the Energy Agency. Thus, at the age of 34, he was already the most influential man in the field of energy in Slovenia and also the man who wanted to oust Vitoslav Türk, the first man of the Eles company, from his position in 2000. During the term of Bajuk’s government, Golob fought like a lion for the leading position of the transitional left in the Slovenian energy sector and challenged all personnel moves of the then-government. All this means that he was already deeply involved in politics at that time, although he later withdrew somewhat and devoted himself mainly to the GEN-I company. However, even during this time, he remained connected with the LDS, Zares, and later even Positive Slovenia party. Then there is the SAB party (also known as Aliance), where he was the president of the SAB party council, and before that, he was the vice-president of Janković’s Positive Slovenia party. Currently, he is still heading the local Robert Golob List. It is quite possible that, following the recipe of Marjan Šarec, who kept the name of his party from his time as mayor in Kamnik, Golob might also bring his own list to the state level. However, after Janković’s debacle in state politics in 2012, Golob said that he was not interested in leading the Positive Slovenia party.
They turned him into a political victim, even though he really is not one
The mainstream media are now portraying Golob as the victim of the government personnel tsunami. However, this is just a fairy tale for the naïve – the fact is that Golob’s term as President of the Management Board of GEN-I has expired, and he has not received enough support to secure another term in office. The godfathers from the background have taken advantage of this by now portraying him as a victim, thus raising his political capital. However, his statements are similarly contradictory in themselves, like those of the party representatives of the Constitutional Arch Coalition, who savagely attack the government and then claim to be willing to cooperate with everyone. Some opinion polls have already called Golob the future Slovenian Prime Minister, which is an unprecedented act of comedy and, at the same time, proof of how motivated the transitional nomenclature is to get all the levers of power back into its hands.
But the fact is that the web portal Požareport wrote at the beginning of this year, when nothing had yet been said about Golob’s possible political engagement, that half a billion euros “disappeared” from GEN-I and are nowhere to be found. What is also interesting is that Vesna Vuković, once a recognisable journalist of the Dnevnik newspaper, who is now part of the core team of the Uncensored web portal, was very much in favour of Golob in the media for a while now, along with her aforementioned colleague Cirman.
Demokracija
