Slovenia Elections Tilt Another European Country to the Right

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — Voters in Slovenia gave a victory to a populist party led by a firebrand former prime minister in parliamentary elections Sunday that tilted another European country to the right.

The Slovenian Democratic Party, led by the two-time former Prime Minister Janez Jansa, received nearly 25 percent of the vote, according to the country’s National Election Commission.

“Those who cast their ballots for us have elected a party that will put Slovenia first,” Jansa told supporters at the party’s headquarters in Ljubljana after the result was announced.

With Sunday’s vote, Slovenia, a European Union member since 2004 and a user of the euro since 2007, could line up politically with Hungary, which re-elected the right-wing populist Victor Orban as prime minister in April, and Austria, where a far-right party has emerged as a strong political force. Jansa has closely allied himself with Orban.

But Jansa could struggle to form a government as most party leaders have rejected the possibility of joining a coalition with him, raising the possibility of an extended period of uncertainty and a new election if coalition talks are deadlocked.

On Sunday, he called on parties on the left and right to join him in a new government “to face internal and external challenges together.”

Jansa, a veteran nationalist politician and a dissident during communist rule, had maintained a lead throughout a two-month election campaign that was marred by disputes over the country’s turbulent past and allegations of corruption within the established parties.

In keeping with his campaign theme, he said Sunday that migration was the biggest challenge facing Slovenia and Europe.

“I will say what I have said already before: We are for solidarity, but we are against stupidity,” he said, advocating a policy of discouraging migrants from coming to Europe by improving conditions in their own countries. “For those who are trying to get to Europe to have a better life, we have to improve their lives at home,” he said.

Since the nation’s independence from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, politics in Slovenia has had a conservative tinge, but center and leftist parties have largely dominated governing coalitions. The shift to populist parties has taken place since the migration crisis of 2015 and 2016, though the shift has not been as strong as in neighboring Italy, where an anti-establishment government was sworn in this past week.

The centrist party of Marjan Sarec, a former actor and the mayor of Kamnik, a small town north of the capital, Ljubljana, came in second with 13 percent of the vote. Sarec, 40, came close to unseating the incumbent, Borut Pahor, in the presidential election in 2017.

Sarec cast himself as an anti-establishment candidate and a leader for a new generation of Slovenians who have come of age in a democratic society and whose top concerns are the economy, jobs and social security, including a robust pension system.

He congratulated Jansa for the victory Sunday, but said his party would heed its vow not to form a coalition with the populist party. If Jansa fails to cobble together a government, Sarec would get a chance. If he too failed, the president could call new elections.

Finishing third in the poll were the Social Democrats of Dejan Zidan, with 10 percent.

The Modern Center Party, led by the outgoing prime minister, Miro Cerar, finished fourth with 9.5 percent — a crushing defeat considering Slovenia’s economy grew by 5 percent on his government’s watch in 2017, one of the fastest rates on the continent, according to the European Union. The election for the 90-seat legislature took place a few weeks earlier than the normal four years because of Cerar’s abrupt resignation in March after a major infrastructure project he had backed was shelved.

In all, nine parties passed the 4 percent threshold to get into parliament, including the party of Slovenia’s first female prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, which received just over 5 percent.

With nearly all of the votes counted, voter turnout stood at 51.8 percent.

The popularity of Cerar, a law professor who won a landslide victory in 2014 after forming a party just weeks before the vote, has been dragged down by a crippling public sector strike in this country of 2 million people that is the birthplace of the United States' first lady, Melania Trump.

His handling of a border dispute with Croatia also brought criticism, as much from his coalition partners as from the right-wing opposition, led by Jansa.

Jansa made the dispute with Croatia, another EU member, one of the campaign’s central issues, accusing Cerar and his predecessors on the left of giving up territory in an international court ruling.

The populist leader also vowed to refuse entry to asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa. Slovenia has participated in the EU’s refugee resettlement program, taking in about 200 asylum-seekers, and Jansa vehemently opposes Brussels’ imposition of migrant quotas on member states.

An average of 20 people a year are granted international protection in Slovenia.

Echoing Orban of Hungary, he has called the influx of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa a threat to European values and a danger to the continent’s stability. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants entering Europe passed through Slovenia, usually on the way to other countries, often Germany, to seek asylum. “We will never allow this to happen again,” Jansa has said.

Jansa led the government as prime minister from 2004-08 and then again, briefly, in 2012. During his leadership, he cracked down on political rivals and the independent news media that he called remnants of the old communist regime. He also exerted control over major state-run companies.

During this campaign, Jansa aimed to cast himself as a uniter, said Miha Kovac, a political analyst and a lecturer at the University of Ljubljana. “It was still Jansa as we know him, blaming others, especially Communists and migrants, for all of the country’s problems that only he can solve,” Kovac said. “But he’s trying hard to be calmer and not as confrontational.”

Still, Kovac said, “I think it will be very hard for him to form a coalition, perhaps even impossible in the first attempt,” adding that it was no easy job for Sarec either, and that it could well be “months if not years of political uncertainty and instability.”