The covers and editorials from leading weeklies of the Left and Right for the work-week ending Friday, 17 March 2020. All our stories about coronavirus and Slovenia are here
Mladina: How the SDS is like the Communist Party
STA, 17 April 2020 – The left-wing weekly Mladina takes a look at what it sees as Janez Janša's Democrats' (SDS) obsession with Communism, pinpointing several SDS features which in fact make it resemble a true Communist Party.
It is really oppressive and depressing to listen to the lies about Communism which the SDS is constantly serving to the public.
It's 2020 and they are still going on about Communist media and Communist leaders, the weekly magazine says on Friday.
This could partly be understood if almost all former Slovenian Communist Party officials who are still active in politics were not in the SDS.
Editor-in-chief Grega Repovž says there are currently three former Communist Party officials in the upper echelons of Slovenian politics.
They are Modern Centre Party (SMC) leader Zdravko Počivalšek, who was not a very ambitious Party member, President Borut Pahor, who was ambitious, and Janša, an ambitious and inquisitive young Communist whose character was not entirely to the Party's liking so it expelled him.
The SDS obviously believes that obsessing with Communism will make it win some legitimacy abroad, whereas it only disgraces itself.
All serious people know that only populists, converts and those having a hard time reconciling with reality are promoting "this East European litany".
"Nevertheless, we are grateful to PM Janša, postmen Uroš Urbanija [acting Government Communication Office boss], and FM Anže Logar for the cable sent to the Council of Europe [about Slovenian media with a Communist bias], because we do not have to explain abroad any more what kind of government is in power in Slovenia."
Mladina says the SDS has several features in common with the Party, listing among other things the hounding of those who disagree with it and the personality cult.
It argues the SDS is a movie-like version of the Communist Party the SDS portrays in its cables and descriptions of the situation in Slovenia.
Whenever the SDS has come to power it seems that when Slovenia left Communism behind to embrace democracy, the SDS did not actually want democracy but merely to take power away from the Communist Party.
The SDS is right in that whenever it comes to power, Slovenia returns 30 years back, Mladina concludes the editorial And When Will We Have "Youth Day"?
Demokracija: The pitfalls of green policies exposed by Covid-19
STA, 16 April 2020 – The right-wing Demokracija magazine makes a case against green policies promoting renewables, saying on Thursday the coronavirus crisis has shown how attempts to make urban areas green, including by promoting public transport as opposed to cars, are misguided.
Wanting to turn urban centres into countryside-like places is a time bomb in that bringing wildlife to cities increases the chances of viruses being transmitted to humans.
Although the novel coronavirus is not necessarily such a case, such behaviour represents a highly risky interaction between nature and urban areas, to which the majority of national and global officials who want to build a green agenda with billions in taxpayer money turn a blind eye.
"The zeal to make urban areas green has reached psychopathic proportions in the fight against global warming," says editor-in-chief Jože Biščak.
He says that the expulsion of personal vehicles from city centres forced many people to use public transport amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has resulted in hundreds of deaths recorded in Madrid, Milan, Paris or New York, yet media agitators and progressive politicians continue to wave the green flag.
"Those who use public transportation know the effect of being packed like sardines; immense crowds using public transport services have proved to be a deadly variant of exaggerated green thinking," the weekly says under the headline The Effect of Packed Sardines.
Nevertheless, the European Commission launched a public debate on the strategy of sustainable finance as part of its multi-billion euro Green Deal.
But Biščak says the smart EU countries have not responded to it, because they know the recession to stem from the pandemic is a much bigger threat to people's prosperity.
Demokracija says the EU's energy policy based on renewables will have to change because no EU country will probably be able to afford the green luxury after the economy contracts, especially because the western civilisation's prosperity is built on cheap fossil fuel, which is right now emerging as a straw that could help restart the economy and save jobs.
All our posts in this series are here
