Presidential candidate Nataša Pirc Musar always proclaims that she will be the President of all Slovenians. Her predecessors had done the same – from Kučan, Drnovšek, Türk, to Pahor. But only two of them managed to do what they promised relatively well, while the other two remained loyal soldiers of their political option. With the “non-partisan” Pirc Musar, it is more than obvious who she belongs to, which part of the electorate she appeals to and, above all, that she will never be the President of the majority of Slovenians, but only the President of half of them.
Can you imagine Milan Kučan, the penultimate Chairman of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – a man who spent his entire career stirring up a dispute among Slovenians – would support a presidential candidate who was not faithful to what in Slovenia, we call the “values of the National Liberation Movement”? Anyone who knows what the situation in Slovenia is like is well aware that this is practically impossible, just as it was impossible to get a good job in the former regime without joining “the party.”
Due to the specific nature of the Slovenian electorate, the seal of approval from the last Slovenian communist is a prerequisite for any left-wing candidate to have a chance of breaking out of the margins, and at the same time, the left-wing candidate in the second round has a pretty good chance of winning in the end, thanks to the “missing” part of the right-wing electorate (those killed, exiled and indoctrinated after 1945). The only one who has so far managed to escape this curse is Borut Pahor, and that only happened because people perceived him as a successful president of the Social Democrats party (Socialni demokrati – SD).
A clearly profiled candidate
Nataša Pirc Musar is, therefore, a candidate with a clear profile. She is the candidate of the hard-line socialist, Yugonostaligic and Russophile forces, which in Slovenia, unlike in other post-communist countries, managed to survive the implosion of their ideology between the years 1989 and 1991. And she behaves accordingly. If in the first round of elections, the extremist Milan Brglez was mainly seen in the various partisan processions, in the second round, Pirc Musar has added her dog whistle and made it clear: “Dear Partisans who slaughtered across Slovenia, and your descendants, who are the heirs of your great red robbery – I am yours.”
The support of the Mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, who supported her while also demonising the right, is also part of the package. It is clear what the support of a politician who has made a career out of fomenting division within the nation really means.
The end of trying for a national reconciliation
If she had previously profiled herself as an operational leftist, she has now also defined herself ideologically in a way that clearly communicates what we can expect from her. She will not follow in Borut Pahor’s footsteps, who sought national reconciliation by visiting both Home Guard and Partisan graves. She will not be a President who, with the Italian President, pays tribute to the victims of both fascism and communism. She will be a President of extreme bullies, such as Zoran Predin, who called Pahor a “traitor.” She will be the President of those employees of the national media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia who labelled the Slovenian Armed Forces honour guard as traitors. She will be the President of the Ljubljana political cycling association of the caviar-socialist Ljubljana elite (to which, of course, she herself belongs).
A President of the leftists
Nataša Pirc Musar will therefore not be the President of all Slovenians. She will be the President of the leftists, who, like Danilo Türk, will divide citizens into first- and second-class. When she speaks of Slovenia and Slovenians, she will only be using these terms through the prism of Slovenian left-wing reality, where there are – to paraphrase the failed politician Brane Golubović – “the right and the normal ones.” She would be the President of the “normal ones,” in quotation marks. The rest of us are not worthy of her consideration. That is why, with Nataša Pirc Musar, after two terms with Pahor, when we finally got some normalcy, we would again have a President who would only make an already toxic political environment even worse.
Andrej Žitnik
