Any rejection of a law in a referendum is a clear failure for the person who proposed it. This is especially true when the proposer is the government. It sends a clear message about the citizens’ dissatisfaction with its work. Thus, for the previous government, the failure was the fall of the Water Act, which was overwhelmingly rejected. And similarly, for the current government, the failure was the fall of the law on special pensions for ‘meritorious’ artists. No excuses about low voter turnout help here.
What the representatives of the ruling coalition, headed by Prime Minister Golob, are doing now, when they are trying to show that those who did not take part in the referendum are, in fact, supporters of this law, is very cheap and transparent and – in short – unconvincing. It is easy to know what the will of those who vote is, what their position is. For those who do not vote, we do not know. We can conclude that they, more often than not, find the issue to be irrelevant and outside their sphere of interest.
Any referendum vote on a government bill is, at least to some extent, a vote on the government itself. Many referendum participants do not look much into the substance of the law, but want to express their (non-)support for those who proposed it. Normally, laws are proposed by the government. Therefore, the result of the vote is a message about what citizens think of it.
This was also the case in the recent referendum. This does not mean that the law in question was unproblematic. It was another attempt to reward “our people”, this time in the field of artistic creation. In the same way that the ruling establishment wants to use taxpayers’ money to bail out the pro-establishment media through changes to media legislation, this law is intended to grant financial benefits to artists who are mainly pro-establishment. Proponents of the law argue that the financial benefits will be awarded on the basis of objective criteria, mainly the awards people have received.
But in art, these criteria are never objective, but always subjective. And these days, they are becoming very arbitrary. This means that (as the art historian Milček Komelj said in an interview for the weekly Demokracija – Democracy) almost anyone can call themself an artist. And virtually anything can be declared a work of art. There is a tendency – not only in Slovenia, but in the whole Western world – to carry out political activism under the guise of art, but only that which is of a left-wing orientation. This is why the vast majority of awards are given to left-leaning authors, and for works that often have little aesthetic value, but which instead convey a ‘political message’.
But the main reason for the rejection of the law was a revolt against the current government and the ruling coalition, its inefficiency and incompetence, and the unworthiness and hubris of its members, whose behaviour has persistently undermined the integrity of state institutions.
The biggest blunder, however, was made by the government – specifically by two government parties – by calling on the people to boycott the referendum. It is scandalous in the extreme that the Prime Minister, ministers and MPs should show such contempt for one of the most important mechanisms of direct decision-making by citizens. To make matters even more absurd, this government has made it one of its objectives to promote civic participation. But nonetheless, it called for a boycott because it had realised that more people would express opposition than support for the law.
It thus tried to avoid a rejection quorum by making this appeal (if the turnout was low enough, the referendum result would not have been valid), but it shot itself in the foot in doing so. Enough people turned out for the referendum anyway, and as some of those who might have voted in favour of the law stayed at home, the margin in favour of the referendum promoters was huge.
Of course, we cannot draw conclusions about the outcome of the next parliamentary elections on the basis of these results. However, this is an incentive for further political initiative by the opposition.
Dr. Matevž Tomšič
