In the hopeless theatre of absurdity, when it became clear that there would be no early elections and no new government, the representatives of the deep state presented a formula analogous to their actions during the pandemic. If they were once destroying Slovenia from within, with the media influences on the main distributors of public opinion views, they are now doing it abroad. The series of untrue accusations against the current government that are currently appearing in the European media are more dangerous for Slovenia’s international reputation than those who are spreading them might be aware of. However, this has nothing to do with the situation in the European Union as a whole. The fact is that Slovenia was the champion in joining the EU. It entered the euro area and Schengen far before all other countries, which emerged from the same historical context. Mainly because of the two politicians who managed to reach a consensus for this step. “One of them was Janez Janša,” Boštjan M. Turk emphasised. This is the European story that we Slovenians have included in the independence programme itself, which has always been our most recognisable success, and which has now taken on dangerous negative accelerations. The European Union, as it was when we joined it, has changed in its basic elements.
In Slovenia, a year has passed since the government of Janez Janša came to power. His name is associated with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, as well as the emergence of Slovenia. The Trial against the Four (Proces proti četverici), which happened in 1988, led to the necessary national unity for the independence project that followed in June 1991. Janez Janša defeated the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) as a bare-handed civilian at the time. He managed to mobilise the entire Slovenian nation against the Yugoslav People’s Army, stealing the adjective it wore with the greatest pride: “national” or “people’s.” After the Trial against the Four, which was essentially a trial against the Slovenian nation and its aspirations for independence, the YPA was simply no longer popular. In the end, its essence was revealed: it was an armed fist of the party bureaucracy, which, after Tito’s death, was no longer in favour of responding to historical challenges. In Slovenia, the Yugoslav People’s Army connected thousands of members who served either as active personnel (officers) or as part of the Counterintelligence Service (KOS).
This was a new class of political nomenclature, as dissident Milovan Đilas called the leading bureaucracy in the party state. Until 1990, it ruled the country completely. After the end of totalitarianism, Slovenia did not know lustration like the other countries of the former Eastern bloc, which are now mostly part of the Visegrad Group. Monopolies were maintained, even though the state has legally introduced systematic changes on the path to European integration, just like Brussels wanted. However, when a copy of the magazine Communisme (edited by the legendary Stéphane Courtois) was published in 2014, the following assessment was written in the editorial: “Slovenia is an example of a country where the once ruling Communist Party was officially abolished, but it still controls the country at all administrative, judicial, media, economic and political levels. Despite the formal existence of the rule of law.”
Freedom only to the monopolies of the deep state
In the same year, 2014, just before the elections, the opposition leader Janez Janša was imprisoned, regardless of the support he enjoyed in the European People’s Party. At the time, parties representing the continuity of the undemocratic regime won a two-thirds majority in the parliament. In fact, Slovenia only seemingly severed the ideological umbilical cord with its previous system. A country where the democratic option has been in power for only seven of the thirty years of its independence does leave the economy to be free, but only to the extent that the economy does not encroach on the monopolies still held by the former nomenclature. The deep state in Slovenia exists in the form of the former nomenclature, which is generationally rejuvenated and adapted to the postmodern time. The most dangerous politician in its eyes is Janez Janša. Because the deep state owns 90 percent of the media, the media front moves from one attack on him to another without interruption. Despite the fact that Janša has been in power for a year, it seems that this will remain as it is. The parties recruited from the former socio-political organisations are even taking advantage of the epidemic in a bid to deal with a team they actually installed themselves, but they are not even aware of it. After Šarec’s resignation, the mathematical calculations showed that there is only one name in the middle and also on the right, which has the consent to become the Prime Minister (Janša), and on the left, there are six, but with one significant difference – none of them have enough support. These names are: Karl Erjavec, Marjan Šarec, Alenka Bratušek, Tanja Fajon, Jože P. Damjan and Luka Mesec – people who would rather kill each other than leave the post of the Prime Minister to someone among themselves.
The United Kingdom is gone, the Visegrad Group is preparing to say goodbye, and Brussels is engaging in conflict with a Member State who did nothing wrong
In an article for the best-selling Croatian political weekly 7Dnevno, Boštjan M. Turk also pointed out, among other things, that the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen should be well aware that by allowing Politico to publish such an unjust conviction, she also sent a catastrophic, disintegrating signal into the whole structure of the EU. The United Kingdom is gone, the Visegrad Group is preparing to say goodbye, and Brussels is engaging in conflict with a Member State who did nothing wrong. None of what Politico wrote is true. The Slovenian government does not control the media – on the contrary, 90 percent of the media in Slovenia are clear in their position against Janez Janša and the members of his government. In Slovenia, freedom of the media is not being violated, and nor is the rule of law. All of these are untrue accusations by the post-communist nomenclature, which has lost power and has therefore intervened abroad to achieve its domestic political goals. Throughout its history, Slovenia has always been a constitutive member of the core of Europe. The European Union, which constantly opposes the so-called nationalism, fights Christianity and constantly defends world peace, congratulated and publicly expressed satisfaction when Joe Biden became the president of the most powerful force on the planet – a man who ordered an armed attack less than a month after his appointment, an overture to more similar stories that will soon follow. Brussels must be told not to worry about Slovenia (and Croatia) but about the EU and the global context of peace and coexistence in the world. Our peace has never been so severely tested as it is now.
Sara Bertoncelj
