Slovenia's election puts liberal democracy on the ballot

Four days before Slovenia's parliamentary election on 22 March, the polling tells an uncomfortable story for anyone who assumes competent government gets rewarded. The hard-right Slovenian Democratic Party, known by its initials SDS, holds a consistent lead of several percentage points over the Freedom Movement of the current prime minister, Robert Golob. This is the same Golob whose coalition became the first in years to serve a full term, the same government that steered the country through devastating floods and an energy price crisis. None of it, apparently, is enough.

A coalition that actually governed

Slovenian politics has not been kind to incumbents. Governments have tended to collapse under the weight of their own fragmentation, sometimes barely lasting a year. The fact that Golob's administration survived a full four-year cycle is itself a break with recent habit. His Freedom Movement, a party that did not exist until months before the 2022 ballot, swept to power with 41 of the 90 seats in the national assembly, the strongest single-party result since Slovenia left Yugoslavia. Teaming up with the Social Democrats and the leftwing Levica, the coalition commanded 53 seats and a workable majority.

The record is mixed but tangible. When severe flooding struck in 2023, the government arranged advance financial assistance to affected municipalities before the full damage assessment was complete. During the energy crisis that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it shielded households and businesses from the worst of the price spikes. The minimum wage was raised. Labour protections for cultural workers were strengthened. A long-delayed long-term care system, which successive governments had postponed for years, was finally introduced, largely on the initiative of Levica, the junior coalition partner holding just three of the 20 ministries.

These are the kinds of policy achievements that centre-left parties across Europe would happily campaign on. Yet the Freedom Movement's support has bled away over the course of the term. Part of the explanation is the party's own making: thrown into office with minimal governing experience, Golob's team sometimes looked as though it was making things up as it went. Improvisation is visible in the record, and voters noticed.

The man who would rather not compromise

The beneficiary is Janez Janša, a figure who has dominated Slovenian conservatism for three decades. Janša has served as prime minister three times since 2000, and his SDS sits at the centre of the Slovenian right in a way that makes comparisons with insurgent populists elsewhere in Europe somewhat misleading. This is not an outsider party clawing at the edges of the establishment. The SDS is the establishment of one half of Slovenian politics, and its voters have proved strikingly loyal. While centre-left voters drift between enthusiasm and disillusionment, SDS supporters hold firm.

Janša's first term, in the mid-2000s, looked like conventional centre-right governance. His later periods in office were different. His 2012-13 government fell after mass protests over corruption allegations, and Janša himself received a two-year prison sentence, though the conviction was later overturned. His most recent term, from 2020 to 2022, coincided with the pandemic and marked a sharp turn towards the kind of institutional confrontation that has become familiar in other European capitals. His administration suspended funding to the Slovenian Press Agency for months, attacked the public broadcaster RTV Slovenija, sought to replace supervisory boards at state institutions, and waged open war against journalists on social media.

Janša has recently made clear that he would prefer to govern with an outright majority, arguing that coalition-building consumes time that should be spent implementing policy. Taken at face value, the comment sounds like frustration with parliamentary arithmetic. In the current climate, it reads as something sharper: a statement of intent to concentrate power beyond the usual checks and balances of coalition negotiation.

What changed between Janša's last term and now

When Janša last held office, his pressure on the media and judiciary provoked a substantial domestic backlash. Tens of thousands of Slovenians, many on bicycles, filled the streets of Ljubljana in protest. The courts pushed back against executive overreach. Civil society organisations mobilised with speed and effectiveness. The European Parliament formally warned about the state of rule of law in Slovenia. Each of these acted as a constraint.

The international landscape has since shifted. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has normalised open hostility towards the media and judiciary on a global stage. The tactics that Janša deployed in his previous term, and that drew condemnation, now have a louder and more powerful champion in Washington. Viktor Orbán's Hungary has provided both a blueprint and a diplomatic shield for illiberal governance within the European Union. The methods of institutional erosion, pressure on independent bodies, delegitimisation of opponents, and the framing of media scrutiny as partisan conspiracy, are no longer experimental. They are tested, refined and mutually reinforced across a network of like-minded leaders.

Janša is an acknowledged admirer of Trump's political style. In conversations across Slovenia over the past year, potential SDS voters have echoed the sentiment in simpler terms: at least he gets things done; we need order. There is a weariness with coalition bargaining and a perception, not always supported by evidence, that liberal governments are procedurally weak. The desire for decisiveness can accommodate a great deal of executive overreach before it objects.

The SDS programme and what it would mean in practice

An SDS-led government would almost certainly prioritise migration. The party advocates tougher border controls and frames population movement primarily as a security threat rather than a social or economic phenomenon. It promises deregulation and a more business-friendly climate, language that resonates with employers frustrated by what they see as excessive red tape. It also talks about depoliticisation of institutions, a term that in Janša's hands has tended to mean replacing independent figures with political loyalists.

None of this would necessarily violate democratic procedure at first. The pattern of democratic erosion in Europe has not been one of dramatic coups or constitutional ruptures. It has been incremental, legal and patient. Institutions are reshaped from within: supervisory boards restacked, public broadcasters starved of funds or placed under friendly management, judicial appointments steered towards compliant candidates. The formal architecture of democracy remains standing. The interior is gradually hollowed out.

Slovenia's membership of the European Union provides a legal and institutional backstop, and its civil society has proved capable of rapid mobilisation. The country is not destined to follow the Hungarian path. But the difference between this election and previous encounters with Janša in power is that the external environment now favours the kind of politics he practises. The precedents exist. The alliances are in place. The rhetorical cover is stronger.

Why a functional government trails in the polls

The polling deficit facing Golob's party raises a structural question about European centre-left politics. A government that delivered flood relief, energy subsidies, a higher minimum wage and a long-term care system should, by the logic of retrospective voting, be in a competitive position. That it is not suggests either that the achievements were insufficiently visible, that the government's competence was called into question by its visible improvisation, or that a segment of the electorate simply does not value those achievements as much as it values the promise of order and decisiveness.

There is also a coalition fatigue factor. Levica's role in pushing through progressive social policy has been substantial for a party controlling only three ministries, but its association with the government may have cost the Freedom Movement support among more moderate voters who view the left with suspicion. The SDS, by contrast, has spent four years in opposition doing what opposition parties do best: criticising without having to deliver. Its familiar refrains about media bias, migrant threats and overregulation have required no reinvention because the global political environment has made them more resonant, not less.

The choice on 22 March

The election is not simply a contest between a centre-left and a centre-right party. It is a choice between two models of governance. One is flawed, occasionally clumsy, and delivered real improvements for people on low incomes and in vulnerable situations. The other is led by a man whose previous term involved sustained pressure on independent media, attempts to reshape state institutions, and a stated preference for governing without the inconvenience of coalition partners.

Slovenia's democratic institutions, its courts, its civil society, and its EU membership all provide resistance. But resistance is not the same as immunity. The tools of illiberal governance are better developed and more widely legitimised than they were four years ago. A Janša victory on 22 March would not automatically produce Hungarian-style democratic backsliding. It would, however, remove the friction that has constrained him in the past, at precisely the moment when that friction is most needed.