In 2018, Prime Minister Miro Cerar resigned as Prime Minister, thus triggering early elections, after the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court ruled that his government had cheated by spending hundreds of thousands of euros on a propaganda campaign during the referendum on the second railway line. I pointed out that this was unfair in the Online Newspaper (Spletni časopis) as soon as the government announced that they were going to get involved in the campaign. The opponents of the project did not get the same amount of public money. In fact, they got no money at all. The Supreme Court’s decision to annul the referendum on the second train track was the last straw, Prime Minister Cerar announced when he resigned. The government fell, and the referendum was repeated.
At the start of the referendum campaign on the legalisation of the right to huge privileges for the cultural elite, Robert Golob repeated the mistake of former Prime Minister Miro Cerar. They learn nothing. A week ago, on the two biggest television channels, POP TV and RTV Slovenia, to which he was invited as the Prime Minister, he called on people to boycott the referendum and propagandised for the project of privileged pensions. He was not there as the boss of one of the parties.
However, he shouldn’t have done that. And he still should not do it now. It is an abuse of power. The government and its Prime Minister must not get involved in a party clash ahead of a referendum. They must work for all the people and not for the projects of the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), the Social Democrats (Socialni demokrati – SD) and the Left (Levica) parties, which are trying to legislate for additional privileges in Parliament. With our money. However, since the opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) has collected 40,000 signatures for the referendum, it will be the people who will decide in the end. If the people reject the idea, there will be no privileges. Since Golob joined the campaign as head of government, which he should not have done, any rejection will also be a vote of no confidence for the entire government.
The Prime Minister and the Minister of Culture, Asta Vrečko, can, of course, act as propaganda bosses of the Freedom Movement and the Left parties. But the Prime Minister and the ministers must not use budget money and functions to secure advantages over their competitors in elections. To illustrate: they must not send the secret service, the police or the army into the campaign and to the polling stations to prevent people from voting for rival parties. They must not threaten supporters of opposition parties with punishment or control how they vote, or pay for votes for themselves out of the budget. Anything like that is forbidden.
We are no longer a communist dictatorship. It is strange that this dimension, that Golob as Prime Minister must not propagandistically call on people to boycott the referendum, has not been seriously brought to the attention of the Prime Minister. Even the lawyers prefer to remain silent around Golob.
Previously, similar rights to the supplement, which guarantees the highest possible pension (up to over 3,000 euros net), were widely legislated for athletes – on the proposal of former Positive Slovenia (Pozitivna Slovenija), the Party of Alenka Bratušek (Stranka Alenke Bratušek – SAB) and the Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia (Demokratska stranka upokojencev Slovenije – DeSUS) MP Peter Vilfan from the left who, in 2017, legislated these rights for himself and other athletes.
It is somewhat comical, however, that the biggest critic of Golob and Vrečko’s exaggerations in the campaign was Marko Bandelli, an entrepreneur and former politician of the now-governing parties. He criticised the Left party’s behaviour, which equates astronomical pension privileges for cultural workers with culture and the arts, where they have a minister. Namely, the Left party wrote on X that a referendum campaign of the SDS party against the arts is starting, also calling it the SDS party’s fight against culture. Bandelli responded to this, writing: “This is written in such a misleading way that it really makes you think about just how low someone can stoop. This is not a referendum against culture and arts. It is intended for everyone to realise that privileged people (the select few) should not exist, especially not at the expense of taxpayers’ money. “
It is certainly true that the referendum is not against or for culture. Cultural activity does not depend on a net three-thousand-euro privileged pension. If that were true, culture would not exist. Not even in Europe. Pension privileges of this magnitude have never existed in this country in centuries past, and they are a complete unknown even in richer countries of Europe. Which is a community of enormous cultural achievements.
The second great manipulation that we are witnessing is the argument that these enormous allowances are necessary because they have been granted by governments before, under a law dating back to the days of socialism, and that the refusal to do so is a defence of the previous regime and therefore of the legacy of Josip Broz Tito. The opposition cannot repeal a socialist law. Only the government parties could, but they have not thought of doing so. Instead, they are greatly expanding the rights under it. They are building on Tito.
The differences are in the purely practical consequences. Under the law of the socialist era, when it comes to athletes, only a few individuals have been granted the privilege since our country gained independence – for example, the father of former Prime Minister Miro Cerar. But under the law of Peter Vilfan, enacted during the government of Miro Cerar, we have reached the number of one hundred athletes who benefit from this law. Vilfan being one of them.
The same will now be true for cultural workers, unless a majority rejects their extensive pension privileges in a referendum. For these, especially after independence, governments have handed out privileges much more widely than for athletes. They are now being given a right, whereas before, it was only an option. The law under socialism allowed the government to share the privilege, but also to refuse all applications. With the law that is going to a referendum, however, it is a question of enforceable rights, where the government no longer decides.
A similar difference lies in the manipulation, which is also being spread by the government, of how privileges were inherited under the socialist law, but will no longer be inherited under the new law. The socialist law did not provide for any inheritance. But it is true that if the government so decides and publishes a decision, it can also grant the privilege to family members of artists. And this is what happened after independence, when the left-wing governments of Janez Drnovšek distributed pension benefits extremely widely (including to Svetlana Makarovič a quarter of a century ago).
Automatic inheritances have emerged in the last decade, and not because of a law dating back to socialist times. In fact, it is the opposite. Following the interpretation of the pension reform that came about with the Pension and Disability Insurance Act 2 (ZPIZ-2), it was considered that widows and widowers and similar deserving persons suddenly had an automatic right to inherit the allowance, as well as fighters, revolutionaries and similar privileged persons. These allocations were not even publicised by the Pension and Disability Insurance Institute. Just like before, the government had to follow the law from socialism if it granted anything to family members.
They hid the names of the lucky ones who were granted these pension supplements. And the allocation became automatic. The names of those who inherited supplements were even hidden from me by the government and the Pension and Disability Insurance Institute when I asked them for information about this. Finally, after the intervention of the Information Commissioner, the list of beneficiaries was sent to me, at least for the year 2022.
Ahead of the referendum, I have now asked the Pension and Disability Insurance Institute for a list of all the heirs to whom the Institute has granted an allowance in this way in the last decade, with the dates on which they were granted. I am still waiting for a response. It is right that people should know. Everything. Because we will be the ones deciding on this in the referendum. And you can’t do that if you don’t have all the information. And the possibility of reflection. And the government has to help people with accurate explanations and information, which is incompatible with the propaganda we have already seen.
Peter Jančič, Spletni časopis
