My analysis of the Slovenian parliamentary election of 2022

 Yesterday, Slovenia's parliamentary election resulted in one of the most significant shake-ups in Slovenian political history, with the new Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda) making one of the most substantial breakthroughs in post-communist Central/Eastern/Southeastern European history for a new party.

The Freedom Movement managed to win 41 seats, easily topping the poll in Slovenia despite only having been founded last year. Given strict thresholds, especially for alliances of parties (although Slovenia has no separate threshold for alliances), that persist throughout Central/Eastern/Southeastern Europe, and that media freedom is generally not as strong as in Western/Northern Europe in practice (in fact the main Slovenian television network, RTV Slovenia, initially refused to acknowledge the Freedom Movement as a political party worthy of coverage), and finally the time it takes for new parties to build up political support even with strong personalities leading said party, this breakthrough is truly remarkable, especially one coming close to a single-party majority in a list-PR only electoral system. Overcoming the long-standing influence of Janez Jansa, who has served as Prime Minister of Slovenia three times (including since March 2020), was also a very significant challenge for any new party, and even more established ones in Slovenia.

Mr Jansa's Slovenian Democratic Party, Slovenia's de facto answer to the Conservative Party, surprisingly managed to win an extra 2 seats, bringing them to 27, but it is clear that his tenure as Slovenian PM is over, even with Mr Jansa having been recently cleared of corruption allegations. Mr Jansa was a known supporter of former US President Donald Trump and current Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, although he did not generally espouse their more extreme "national right-wing populist" views.  Their gains arguably came from the collapse of the Marjan Senec list and the Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia (DeSUS) in particular; both those parties lost all their seats in the Slovene National Assembly by falling below the 4% threshold even though both had left Mr Jansa's governing coalition by the time the election was called. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic having been dominant news (as elsewhere in the world) in Slovenia during much of the last two years, voters clearly did not forget. The Freedom Movement also eclipsed them in many respects, being committed to green liberalism and pro-Europeanism like many opposition parties. The junior partners of Mr Jansa's coalition, New Slovenia-Christian Democrats, managed to gain 1 seat, again mainly from lapsed former supporters of the Marjan Senec list and DeSUS.

Both the main parties of the "left" in Slovenia, the Social Democrats and Levica, both polled poorly; the Social Democrats lost 3 seats leaving them with 7, and Levica was reduced to 5 seats, only narrowly passing the 4% threshold for representation. In the latter case infighting within Levica, which caused the defection of 2 of their MPs to the Social Democrats, harmed their case for a socialist opposition in Slovenia, As for the Social Democrats, they were briefly in the governing coalition but left when Mr Jansa returned as PM; as was the case with the downfall of the Marjan Senec list, voters were not prepared to forgive or forget that easily. A rejection of nationalist populism that led to the defeat of SDS also led to the elimination of the national conservative (and de facto racist and anti-immigrant) Slovenian National Party from the National Assembly, which polled a miserable 1.5%. The Let's Connect Slovenia alliance also failed to win any seats, partly because its platform was too similar in many ways to the much more popular and well-resourced Freedom Movement party. Like so many other anti-vaccine parties, Resni.ca failed to gain any representation, although its vote share of 2.87% is considerably better than similar parties manage elsewhere in Europe (by comparison, the Party of Normal Life failed to even poll 1% in the Hungarian parliamentary election earlier this month). The wooden spoon of this election goes to the United Slovenia Movement, which polled just 164 votes, one of only two parties to poll less than 1000 votes in this election.

Robert Golob, leader of the Freedom Movement, is now set to become the next Prime Minister of Slovenia although whether he can form a stable coalition is another story, since running a minority government is essentially out of the question. A Freedom Movement-Social Democrats coalition is the most likely outcome given that no other parties with a liberal outlook remain in the Slovene National Assembly.