Slovenians head to the polls in a close race marred by a spy scandal

Slovenia is holding parliamentary elections on Sunday, with liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob facing right-wing populist Janez Janša, who has held the post three times.

Polls close at 19:00 and the first partial results are expected later in the evening.

The last election before the electoral silence began on Saturday showed a narrow lead for the Golob Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), which sits with the Renew group in the European Parliament.

Neither Golob’s camp nor Janez Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) appear to be on track for an outright majority, and media reports suggest Coalition talks are likely to follow the ballot.

Allegations of espionage and foreign interference have cast a shadow over the former Yugoslav republic’s closely contested tenth parliamentary election.

Golob’s center-left coalition government has accused Jansha’s party engaged Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube to influence the election through a smear campaign.

Janša has denied any connection to Black Cube, but has pointed to secretly recorded conversations now circulating online – purportedly exposing wrongdoing by senior government officials – highlighting entrenched state corruption.

Golob took SUPPORTING of French President Emmanuel Macron, from the same centrist political family, at this week’s EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

Change of direction

When Golob replaced Janša as prime minister in 2022, it marked a sharp turn in political direction for the small Alpine nation.

The Freedom Movement and its leftist coalition partners have been noted for their harsh criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza and its own. recognition of a Palestinian state.

Janša has been consistently pro-Israel and is a close ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, though far less divisive on the EU stage. While the two share hard-line views on issues such as migration, Jansha consistently SUPPORT EU sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

Furthermore, unlike Orbán’s Fidesz, Janša’s SDS party has not been expelled from the conservative European People’s Party (EPP). But Jansha is still a controversial figure. His online attacks on journalists earned him a signature REPRIMAND by the Commission in 2021.

He was sentenced to two years in prison in 2013 in a corruption case involving defense contracts, to be sentenced later is cancelled. Last year he saw his Apology in a separate affair involving real estate deals, a case Jansha claimed was fabricated to disqualify him from running for a fourth term.

(rh)