After the meeting of Slovenian mayors with the Prime Minister and ministers of the current government, which took place on the 5th of June at Brdo pri Kranju, the Mayor of the Municipality of Semič, Polona Kambič, subsequently responded to the meeting by pointing out what the other representatives of the associations of Slovenian municipalities did not. She said that Prime Minister Robert Golob had mocked the mayors, asking them to live off their savings, just like him.
“Not a word about the Prime Minister’s mocking of mayors in his final implementation of the salary increase that will only happen in 2027 in the news?” said Polona Kambič, Mayor of the municipality of Semič, after the news about the meeting of the government with Slovenian mayors has been made public. Kambič was critical of the other representatives of the Association of Slovenian Municipalities, who kept certain details of the meeting quiet and only told the media things that would portray the government in a good light. If the mayors expected the Slovenian government or the Prime Minister to help them regulate wage disparities, they can forget about it, because the Prime Minister was clear, Kambič said, that they should “fight for their own wages.”
In her response, she wrote that Prime Minister Robert Golob had told the mayors at the meeting that their office was “in a way an honourable one” and that, like him, they should live off their savings and that he would be able to live off his savings for “at least one more term.” “Of course, it is possible to make a small amount of savings from an annual salary of over 400 thousand euros in the previous job, but not as much from the 40 thousand or 50 thousand euros that most mayors receive annually. I am in my fourth term as mayor, and it is very clear that I am not here for the salary. Many of my colleagues have been mayors for several more terms,” Kambič wrote.
The government will not fight for the salaries of mayors
The government will not fight for the salaries of mayors, as the Prime Minister has told them to fight for their own salaries, and Kambič thus wondered: “Who passes laws in this country, if not our elected representatives, our MPs? And most of them are from the political party the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), so they should do their job,” she was critical, adding that they themselves have been warning about wage disparities for two mandates, “when half of the employees have a higher salary, not to mention the directors of some public institutions and public companies, we have been tweeting for the past two mandates, but apparently we will have to wait until 2027. But I don’t believe in this promise either, because it is too big a shift, which will be subject to the next parliamentary elections,” she wrote.
She expressed great disappointment with the Prime Minister and the representatives of the associations of Slovenian municipalities “for their subordinate position” because, as she explained, “none of the three presidents of the representative associations of Slovenian municipalities present addressed the Prime Minister’s implementation. Not even in their statements to the media that happened after the meeting, when they were only saying things that portray the current government in a positive light. The question that arises for me is, to whom are they beholden, is this perhaps part of a higher strategy? Probably not,” she believes.
“In my opinion and based on my feelings from yesterday, Slovenian mayors were in a way used by the current government to strengthen its political position in the public eye,” the Mayor of Semič added in conclusion.
Ana Horvat
