Slovenian Jansa is following Hungary on an authoritarian path

The intimidation of the chief auditor of Slovenia began shortly after his institution began to study the public procurement of protective equipment during the pandemic.

“There was a sudden change,” Tomaz Vesel, auditor general at the Financial Times, said. “Attacks on the court [of auditors], and very personal attacks on me began. . . with a clear goal of relativizing possible findings “.

Vesel’s audit identified hiring irregularities, but also acknowledged the frantic rush to buy masks and gowns during the early days of the crisis. However, even then the denigration campaign continued, with success in the pro-government media and a number of tweets of Prime Minister Janez Jansa questioning the integrity of Vesel.

After the report was released, police began investigating the audit office, Vesel said. “It was the first time: I never faced it in my entire career, nor has the institution. I hope there is something substantial behind it. If not, it is a form of political pressure.

Vesel’s treatment is indicative of growing concerns about Slovenian democratic norms and the rule of law as the country prepares to take over the rotating EU presidency in July.

Jansa is known for her aggressive interventions on Twitter. But critics fear that his government will also try to restore democratic balance. as in neighboring Hungary.

“You can really feel the culture of not accepting the control mechanisms of our society,” Vesel said. “The constitutional court, the ombudsman and the court of auditors are like an immune system. If you attack your own immune system, there are several diseases on the horizon.

Jansa and his ally, Interior Minister Ales Hojs, have criticized recent court verdicts, including a ruling by the constitutional court, which determined that government-imposed pandemic restrictions unduly violated personal freedoms.

“In democracies, there should be narrow limits of acceptable criticism of judges, but in Slovenia our government does not respect any of these limits,” said Rok Ceferin, a court judge. “We are discredited, humiliated and insulted every time we make a decision that does not like the government, the prime minister and, in some cases, their close affiliates.”

Jansa’s political career reflects that of his close Hungarian ally Viktor Orban. Both were anti-communist liberals who became right-wing Eurosceptics.

Jansa was a leader of the communist youth before reaching political prominence as a dissident in the late 1980s, when Yugoslavia, of which Slovenia was a part, began to disintegrate. He wrote articles for Mladina, a youth publication he now publicly insults, and was arrested in 1988 for an article he co-authored and which, according to authorities, revealed military secrets.

His arrest sparked massive demonstrations that many believe are accelerating the pace of democratic reform in Slovenia.

But in 2013, during a second term as prime minister, he was convicted of bribing in an arms acquisition deal. The constitutional court overturned the sentence in 2015. But Jansa has long blamed the media for expelling him from office.

After returning to power for a third term in March last year, when a left-wing coalition collapsed, he said a “war against the media it would be more than welcome in Slovenia ”.

“A reduced environment of publishers creating an atmosphere of intolerance and hatred, which has family and capital connections to the pillars of the deep state,” he wrote in an essay.

He has publicly attacked media organizations and journalists on Twitter, earning him the nickname “Marshall Tweeto.”

Although much of the pressure comes through social media, in what Vesel describes as a “well-designed and well-produced campaign” with a “pattern of attacks”, some Slovenes are concerned that damage will be done. important.

In March, the Slovenian Association of State Prosecutors complained in the Council of Europe, the region’s democracy watchdog, on what he called “numerous inadmissible pressures” on the judiciary. He noted the public criticism of Jansa and her allies and the blocking of several key court appointments.

He also noted that the government has delayed the appointment of the two Slovenian delegates to the new European Prosecutor’s Office, set up to examine the misuse of EU funds. The EPPO is supposed to open on June 1, but will have to do without Slovenian prosecutors.

The association said this was due to the fact that the candidates “had fallen into disfavor with the SDS [the Slovenian Democratic party] and its president Janez Jansa ”.

The government did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

The Prime Minister has also launched a campaign against the Slovenian news agency (STA). It started shortly after an October 2020 meeting between Jansa and Orban, said Petra Lesjak Tusek, president of the Slovenian Journalists Association. The government complained, he said, that a report from the meeting agency was too short. Shortly afterwards, he stopped public funding.

“The agency is faltering on the brink of insolvency,” said its editor-in-chief, Barbara Strukelj.

Jansa has accused the STA, national broadcaster RTV and the largest private television channel POP and other media of spreading “lies”. Marko Milosavljevic, a journalism professor at the University of Ljubljana, said the government has proposed a revision of media legislation that “has the common goal of punishing the media.”

He said Jansa was following the Orban playbook by shutting down critical media voices and ensuring that allies take control of other outlets.

The Slovenian government is following all “Hungary’s strategies, all its patterns of censorship and control over the public media,” he added.

Jansa has rejected claims that his government is pressuring the media.

In March, he clashed with Sophie in t ‘Veld, a member of the European Parliament, during a videoconference hearing on democratic norms. When he refused to allow him to play video claiming that journalists are biased, Jansa accused her of censorship – and disconnected the call.