The covers and editorials from leading weeklies of the Left and Right for the work-week ending Friday, 5 February 2021. All our stories about coronavirus and Slovenia are here
Mladina: Janša getting ready for snap election
STA, 5 February 2021 - The left-wing weekly Mladina says in its latest editorial that Prime Minister Janez Janša has been gearing up for a snap election for a while by deliberately weakening the Pensioners' Party (DeSUS) and the Modern Centre Party (SMC) so that he can hold them in his grip.
According to unofficial information, Janša threatened the SMC at Wednesday's coalition meeting with election. Allegedly, he said that if SMC MPs did not vote for a government proposal on public agencies he would initiate a snap election.
Janša has made it clear in many ways that he is prepared for an election: he has initiated the coalition Unite Slovenia, he has amendments to the election law ready, and the Democrats (SDS) have their lists of local candidates almost ready according to local sources, Mladina says.
"And what is the craziest of it all? That the SMC do not get that at some point Janša will indeed trigger an election. And not only that: that Janša knows that at that point they will be left all alone and without support."
Janša has been making sure all along that the SMC and DeSUS will not be able to recover after their political U-turn.
"We all remember how he and [former government Covid-19 spokesman Jelko] Kacin used to humiliate DeSUS minister Tomaž Gantar day after day. Just as it seemed the public trusts him, he got at least one political slap in the face every week.
"And what is Janša doing to the education minister, Simona Kustec, an SMC member? He humiliates her every week. Honestly, every week. He annuls her every move thus making a fool of her."
But just as DeSUS MPs do not understand that the arrows flying towards Gantar were intended for them because Janša wants them to be as weak as possible, the SMC does not understand that by humiliating Kustec, Janša is humiliating the entire SMC.
SMC president Zdravko Počivalšek does not see how cleverly he is being manipulated by Janša only to be left high and dry in the end. "That's simply what Janša does to 'friends'. After all it's what he also did to [former SDS leader] Jože Pučnik," says Mladina under the headline Violent Rule.
Demokracija: Criticism of university enrolment approval delay unreasonable
STA, 4 February 2021 - The right-wing weekly Demokracija comments on Thursday on the criticism with which the delay in approving university enrolment figures for the next academic year was met. "The toxic arrows" aimed at the government are completely unreasonable, it says.
The reaction by privileged sub-systems in the swamp of cultural Marxism to the government's action was fierce, with the main argument being that the government was now interfering in matters that were a mere formality so far.
"Yes, my dears, this is the problem, this mere 'formality' of approving something nobody in the country needs, approving something that only serves an ideological course created by the consecrated: creating a mass of humanities majors to lecture about social fairness. But nobody comes to think that sooner or later we will run out of those earning money with their hands."
The magazine says that "intellectual and academic terrorism" had been controlling the education system for far too long.
The current state of affairs with humanities offering 39% of new study places, while there are 2 percentage points fewer places to study technology, IT and natural sciences, does not reflect reality, the weekly says under the headline Planes Don't Land Here Anymore.
This only causes the need to create new jobs for the unemployables, mostly in the public sector, while the country needs to lure in engineers and doctors from abroad.
All our posts in this series are here
