The covers and editorials from leading weeklies of the Left and Right for the work-week ending Friday, 1 May 2020. All our stories about coronavirus and Slovenia are here
Mladina: Hatred will trigger more protests
STA, 30 April 2020 - The left-wing weekly Mladina says in its latest editorial entitled Right to Protest that Prime Minister Janez Janša's opposition to protests is ironic and that open hatred will not stop protests, it will multiply them.
It is understandable that Janša finds protests upsetting and disturbing, editor-in-chief Grega Repovž says in reference to Monday's protests against the government held in several cities.
"It is ironic that a man whose freedom as well as political career largely stem from protests whose main initiator (together with radio station Radio Študent) was this magazine detests protests so very much," says Repovž.
Janša's Democrats (SDS) have been among the most active organisers of protests for the last thirty years. Some of them were very questionable, for example those held in front of the courthouse in Ljubljana, but nobody attempted to stop them, he notes.
It is also ironic that the Slovenian Social Democratic Union (SDZS), which Janša later turned into the populist and extreme SDS, was founded by France Tomšič, the man who organised the first trade unions' protests in socialist Slovenia. Moreover, the SDZS emerged from those protests.
And now this party stood against the protesters in the Ljubljana city centre on Monday by sending police and its "violent interior minister" against them. Only the protesters expressing political views were fined.
According to Repovž, the government is trying to scare people because in March 2013 Janša and the SDS were swept away from power by all-Slovenian protests, a massive nation-wide uprising.
Janša's fear is justified and his "police minister" Aleš Hojs is nervous only because now they have no legitimate let alone legal basis to act against the protesters. "But they don't know any other way. They hate and despise openly, and do not hold back even in public anymore."
But if they did not despise and would try to understand, they would realise that such actions will not stop protesters. "One political graffiti erased means a hundred new ones. And the same goes for protests," Repovž says.
"We have actually already reached the point when the NSi, SMC and DeSUS will quickly have to start thinking about the direction that the SDS is taking Slovenia. SDS ministers have crossed several thin lines in the past weeks ... And they were able to cross them only because they are holding these three parties hostage."
Repovž says that it has now become irrelevant that the parties themselves are also to be blamed for this. The only question now is when they realise that some processes are becoming irreversible, he says.
Demokracija: "Mainstream media" reporting on govt
STA, 30 April 2020 - The right-wing weekly paper Demokracija praises in its latest editorial the government's efforts in combating the coronavirus epidemic and adds that while "even foreign governments and media praise the determined attitude of the Slovenian government, Slovenian media rarely praise the right-oriented government".
Demokracija's editor-in-chief Jože Biščak takes issue with last week's Tarča current affairs on TV Slovenija, which also featured Ivan Gale from the Commodities Reserves Agency talking about political meddling in the procurement of personal protective equipment.
Biščak says a time when people are dying "is no time for the kind of political and ideological games that [opposition leaders] Marjan Šarec and Dejan Židan were orchestrating together with the journalists of the national broadcaster in Tarča".
He argues it is strange but not surprising that RTV Slovenija is "reserving its prime time to split hairs and not to protect people".
Biščak adds that this goes beyond the national broadcaster, since the "entire media mainstream...is literary competing in the creation of scandals and chaos from thin air".
"The poorer that Slovenia fares and the sooner this government slips, irrespective of the cost, the better for them - the searchers of the golden fleece," Biščak says in the commentary entitled The Searchers of the Golden Fleece.
All our posts in this series are here
