The covers and editorials from leading weeklies of the Left and Right for the work-week ending Friday, 6 March 2020
Mladina: Šarec, Mesec not to blame for Janša's rise to power
STA, 6 March 2020 - The left-wing weekly Mladina says in its latest editorial that blaming the Left and the Marjan Šarec List for Janez Janša's rise to power would be easiest. But the fact is that the two parties acted exactly as they were expected.
Luka Mesec of the Left and Marjan Šarec could have kept the outgoing coalition alive for a while longer to prevent the forming of the Janša government by making constant concessions to capital, but in the end, they would undoubtedly be the losers.
What happened now would happen at the next election at the latest, says editor-in-chief Grega Repovž under the headline Šarec and Mesec Are Right.
What caused the collapse of the outgoing coalition was the August 2019 proposal to abolish top-up health insurance. "The minute the Left proposed the law that would actually implement what was written in the coalition agreement, the entire coalition was up in arms.
"That was when not only the coalition but also the LMŠ fell apart, as both most important ministers from Šarec's party (finance minister and health minister) opposed the law. Because they deemed it ideologically unacceptable."
The neo-liberal parties in government immediately voiced opposition to the proposal: the SMC, SAB, even the SD complained, but hopefully only because the Left tabled the proposal, Repovž says.
Parties started calculating and MPs realised they might lose their jobs. The government did not collapse because of stubbornness of Mesec or Šarec's incompetence but because of clear ideological differences within the coalition and the LMŠ, Repovž claims.
It was a typical clash between the left and right, those who favour public health and those who want to privatise healthcare.
Parties picked sides very clearly: the SDS, NSi, SAB, SMC, DeSUS and the SNS stood to defend capital and the wealthy. "Yes, the SAB is on the list too and is not in the SDS-led coalition today only because Janša will never forget that he had to hand over the PM post to Alenka Bratušek in 2013."
The LMŠ closely escaped being put on this list as well, mainly thanks to its deputy group. People such as outgoing Finance Minister Andrej Betroncelj could have easily prevailed in the party but when they did not, departures started and Šarec was left in a position when all he could do was to resign.
"It is without a doubt terrible that Slovenia got a government led by a far-right politician. The price will be high. But in the last election we simply elected mostly the parties and MPs that see politics merely as a means to satisfy their own interests and the interests of the capital ... But at least now they are together and are no longer hiding behind the Left and the LMŠ."
Demokracija: Centre-right alliance will last for years
STA, 5 March 2020 - The right-wing weekly Demokracija is confident in its latest editorial about the firmness of the new centre-right coalition, saying cooperation between centrist and right-wing parties is "much more natural than an alliance between far-left radicals, socialists (masked as socdems), and alleged liberals".
Demokracija's editor-in-chief Jože Biščak says coalition infighting had indeed been among the reasons for the resignation of outgoing PM Marjan Šarec, but the changes at the helm of the Modern Centre Party (SMC) and the Pensioners' Party (DeSUS) were crucial for what followed.
Biščak says their former Presidents Miro Cerar and Karl Erjavec "were increasingly openly flirting with socialists ideology, while Zdravko Počivalšek and Aleksandra Pivec immediately started moving their parties back to the centre and liberal values".
Thus Biščak believes Počivalšek and Pivec's claims "that the time lost with an election would have had disastrous consequences for Slovenia over media assertions that they are saving their parties from being erased from the political arena in a snap election".
While criticising last Friday's rally organised against the new coalition as a sign "we are sinking back into a totalitarian world", Biščak is confident that the new coalition is ideologically firm, up to the task, and has a good chance of making it until the end of the term.
"Even more. There are signs emerging on the horizon of a firm coalition between liberal and right-wing parties after the 2022 election," Biščak says in the commentary entitled Sorry for Even Existing.
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