Keywords

Introduction

Since the transition to democracy in Slovenia, four party systems can be distinguished: (1) the transitional party system (1988–1991); (2) consolidation of the first party system based on the 1991 constitution (1992–2000 elections); (3) destabilization of the party system (2004–2008 elections); and (4) continuous radical renewal of the party system (2011–2022 elections).

The systems differ among themselves based on various combinations of several main party system characteristics: fragmentation, institutionalization and polarization. In line with the methodology presented in Chapter 5, these characteristics are further decomposed by referring to particular indicators.

First, each party system is described in detail, and at the end of the chapter, a comparative longitudinal view brings together an analytical summary of changes in the party system over time.

Transitional Party System (1988–1991)

The transitional party system had evolved based on amendments to Slovenia’s republic constitution (1988–1990) when it was still part of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The transformed law legalized both the previously existing oppositional proto-parties and the quick formal establishment of other new parties. Just before the first multiparty elections in 1990, around 35 were registered, and in April 1992 there were as many as 91 registered parties in Slovenia (Fink-Hafner 1997, 142). The atomized party system evolved into the party system based on the free elections held in April 1990.

Oppositional political parties had been emerging from various milieus, such as: new social movements (The Greens of Slovenia); social opposition to the old regime such as the Writers’ Association, a group of intellectuals around Nova revija (the New Journal) (the Alliance of Intellectuals later renamed the Slovenian Democratic Party); mobilization of various social groups like farmers and craftsmen (Slovenian People’s Party, which initially presented itself as a ‘class’ party, the Slovenian Craftmen’s party); political organization of formerly unpolitically organized social groups, e.g. the retired (Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia); political organizations of regions (e.g. the Allianse of Haloze, Party of Slovenian Štajerska, Alliance of Primorska); milieus determined by religion (Christian socialist intellectuals’ journal Revija 2000/Journal 2000) or ethnicity (e.g. Alliance for Equal Rights of Citizens, Aliance of Roma—Gipsies, Communita Italiana) (Fink-Hafner 1997, 143).

While the social rootedness of the new parties was somewhat questionable, as they had been parties in the making and more or less electoral committees, the social rootedness of the transforming socio-political organizations had been under stress as they needed to compete with new parties for supporters. Nevertheless, election laws encouraged new parties to develop territorial organizations outside several centres, where they had been initially established. Slovenians’ party identity was rather low—in 1991, the average sum of survey answers (being a particular party member or being its sympathizer) amounted to 9.3% (Toš 2021).Footnote 1 Party membership of the new political parties started to develop at the same time as the reformed League of Communists faced a substantial drop from about 125,000 to around 23,000 members (Krašovec 2014).

In spite of the fact that the party system was very fragmented (9 small parties) (Table 7.1) and that each party competed individually, the competition was initially bipolar. The opposition (DEMOS political parties) adopted an anti-communist stand while parties emerging from the old socio-political organizations were considered to be on the opposite side of the communism vs anti-communism cleavage. This cleavage had functioned as a crucial cleavage in spite of old socio-political organizations’ transforming and consent on democratic transition under oppositional pressure.

Table 7.1 Characteristics of party systems immediately after the national parliamentary elections and election turnout (1990–2022)
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Beside the reformed League of Communists, there were two other parties with roots in socio-political organizations that kept many organizational resources gained in the frame of the old regime (together they received 37.1% of the votes in the 1990 elections). However, not all of them succeeded in adapting efficiently to the democratic framework and keeping their parliamentary status in the following elections, in spite of their pre-existing organizational networks and other organizational resources. The new political parties (which emerged in opposition to the previous regime, together gaining 54.8% of the votes in the 1990 elections) were initially poorly institutionalized (many of them emerged just before the elections and also very soon ended up in the party graveyard), while the DEMOS coalition, due to internal differences, dismissed itself in 1991.

In the fragmented party system a full rainbow of ideological orientations without extremes was presented—reformed socialist and communist, green, Christian democrat, conservative–agrarian, anti-communist social democrat and regional parties as well as parties representing craftsmen (Table 7.2). In spite of the bipolar competition, the largest individual party result at the 1990 elections went to the transformed League of Communists with a programme entitled ‘Europe now’. It gained 7.5% of the seats in the Social-Political Chamber, or 10% of all the seats in the—at that time still—three-chamber assembly.

Table 7.2 Results of parliamentary elections in Slovenia 1992–2022 (no. of parliamentary seats out of 88 filled by party MPsa)
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This led to a broad government coalition not only involving DEMOS parties but also allowing for the participation of the reformed League of Communists of Slovenia (Gov.si, n.d.a; Fink-Hafner 1999, 110). A combination of continuity and change was also seen in the selection of the Prime Minister from the new party (Christian Democrats) and the election of Milan Kučan (former president of the reformed League of Communists) as the President of the Presidency of Slovenia’s republic in 1990 and then as the President of the Republic of Slovenia (1992).

Polarization had been somewhat constrained by the external threat of intervention by federal Yugoslav institutions, including the Yugoslav army. Nevertheless, several long-term big political issues developed, including the interpretation of World War Two and of the socialist regime (including the postwar killings), political control of the mass media, privatization, denationalization and Church–state relations (including issues concerning the historical role of the Catholic Church in the Slovenian territory, its economic wealth and influencing public policies).

In spite of the centrifugal tendencies within some new parties and in the party system as a whole, parties had been able to collaborate in making several crucial common decisions: the formal decision was made to declare an independent state and adopt a new constitution determining Slovenia’s political system as a parliamentary democracy based on liberal democratic principles and a welfare state. The legal basis for the development of a capitalist economy, which had initially been created by adopting amendments to the old constitution by the old political elite (under the pressure of political opposition and the economic elite), was also further ensured by the new constitution adopted in December 1991.

Obviously, in this period political parties and the relations among them could not have been predictable and there is no basis for referring to the party system closure. On the one hand, the governmental arena allowed for alternation in power (DEMOS parties formed the government based on the 1990 elections for the Sociopolitical Chamber of a three-chamber republican assembly). However, due to the inclusive formula of government formation, the government involved not only six small parties but also the former governing party gaining access to the executive (Zajc 2009). Nevertheless, it was not only the numerous coalition partners that had made governing very difficult. The new parties had still been in the process of consolidation, meaning that they had been dealing with internal ideological differences within, as well as among, themselves.

All in all, in spite of the difficulties, the combination of the above-presented characteristics of parties and a party system contributed to a successful transition to democracy.

Consolidation of the First Party System Based on the 1991 Constitution (1992–2000 Elections)

The newly created parties had been busily reforming through splits and integrations. They had tended to quickly change their names, and MPs had been moving from one parliamentary group to another. The two reformed old parties (Liberal Democracy and the successor of the reformed League of Communists) had been integrating some small political groupings and some of the Greens. Nine years after the first democratic elections, the number of active and registered parties had become more moderate. About 30 parties had been officially registered under the new law on political parties of autumn 1994. Only about a third of them succeeded in developing their organizational network over the whole Slovenian territory and ensured they had enough resources for survival. Several key parties had been growing in terms of electoral support (Table 7.2).

In spite of poor early institutionalization, the new political parties had been gaining party membership. For example, the Slovenian Christian Democrats with 35,000 and the Democratic Party of Pensioners with 25,000 had more members than the successor of the transformed League of Communists with 23,000 members (Krašovec 2014). The successor of the reformed League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia had around 6,000 members and the predecessor of Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party had been gaining membership slowly (Krašovec 2014).

Party personalization started to evolve with the anti-communist Social Democratic Party of Slovenia (a predecessor of the Slovenian Democratic Party) after Janez Janša had taken over the party. Also, the Slovenian National Party had been undistinguishable from its leader Zmago Jelinčič.

Social rootedness in terms of citizens’ identification with parties had been rather poor. In the period between 1995 and 2000, the percentage of citizens feeling close to any party fluctuated slightly around 20%, with the only sizeable decline being in 1996, which was marked by problems in the formation of government (Toš 2007, 17). The poor new party organizational resources have only allowed a few political parties to survive the transitional period and democratic consolidation. However, the early establishment of party state funding contributed to the stability of the party system core while at the same time producing state-dependent parties (Krašovec and Haughton 2011).

Nevertheless, besides the reformed League of Communists and the reformed League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia, some new parties also successfully consolidated themselves (the centre-left Democratic Party of Pensioners, Janša’s anti-communist party—at that time named the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia—and to some extent the extreme-right Slovenian National Party). The conservative Slovenian People’s Party and the Christan Democratic Party had hurt themselves by trying to position themselves both separately and, for some time, as one merged party during this decade. In the 2000 elections, a new party, the Party of the Youth, entered parliament for the first and last time.

During the first decade of consolidation of democracy, the party system appeared to have been consolidating while it had been losing some ideological diversity (the Greens, parties representing craftsmen) while maintaining the party system’s openness and dynamics. The institutional context (proportional election system and parliamentary constitution choice) contributed to the continuous fragmentation of the party system. The centre-left parties opted against the introduction of a system with some or even prevalent majoritarian characteristics (opposing Janša’s party favouring the majoritarian system).

It was particularly due to the electoral success of the centre-left Liberal Democracy of Slovenia that the cluster of parties with roots in the former regime rose from around 37% in the period between the 1990 and 1996 elections to 48.3% after the 2000 elections (Table 7.2). The success of the cluster of parties without roots in the former regime had been volatile but reached 47.9% in the 2000 elections. During the 1992–2000 period, the parties without roots in the previous regime empowered the centre-right cluster more than the centre-left cluster in the party system, including even the strengthening of the right ideological extreme with the Slovenian National Party.

In that process, elements of a polarized and moderate party system (according to Sartori’s typology) mixed to varying degrees, with a rather high party system fragmentation, polarization on several long-term political issues (as noted in the previous subsection) while collaborating on other major political issues, the existence of a double opposition and ideological fever.

During that period, Janša’s party (at that time the anti-communist Social Democratic Party of Slovenia) contributed to elements of polarized pluralism. This included the anti-communist, particularly personalized anti-Milan Kučan stand (even after Kučan’s retirement), which has persisted until today with various stresses (e.g. pointing at the dangerous former secret service, UDBA’s, remains in the form of ‘udbo-mafia’). Janša believed that Kučan, a leader of the liberalized former Slovenian League of Communists, sacrificed him by having him arrested in 1988 due to publishing sensitive federal Yugoslav documents and then handing him to the Yugoslav army for a trial before the Yugoslav army court in Ljubljana. Besides that, Janša’s party had also been challenging the existing political institutions. It had been questioning the legitimacy of elections and demanding the electoral system be changed into a majoritarian electoral system. The party even internationalized conflicts around the change in the electoral system, expressed in differing political interpretations of a referendum on electoral system change (Fink-Hafner and Novak 2022). It had also proactively intruded into conflictual political issues on the party system agenda, making other parties take a more or less reactive stand. The 2000 election campaign also clearly indicated that Janša’s party was moving towards the more extreme right by misusing the issues of many marginal social groups.

In the frame of a three-polar party competition, which evolved after the 1992 elections, the centre-left Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (LDS) established itself as an integrating actor of the centre-left and centre-right governmental coalition partners. The formation and maintenance of the government had been very difficult due to there being numerous partners (Table 7.3). Nevertheless, for most of the first decade after the transition, the LDS had ensured safe governing majorities with the inclusion of ideologically very diverse parties (Zajc 2009). The LDS even invented a formula to include parties that could not have agreed directly to collaborate within the same government. An example is the LDS’s creation of a coalition government including the anti-Communist Social Democratic Party of Slovenia combined with the LDS’s special agreement with the successor of the former Communist party. Janez Drnovšek’s (LDS’s leader) valuable experience at the complex Yugoslav level of politics toward the end of the regime, as well as his international experience, had also proved to be helpful in the national context. Later on, other parties of the Prime Minister also sometimes used the signing of a special agreement or other forms of agreement between the party of the Prime Minister and an individual opposition party on so-called ‘project collaboration’ in order to ensure a big enough parliamentary majority to adopt the government’s projects. There were no early elections in this period. Rather, individual coalition partners had dropped out (Krašovec and Krpič 2019).

Table 7.3 Characteristics of party systems and government formation immediately after the national parliamentary elections, and election turnout (1990–2022)
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Multi-partner governing coalitions during the 1990s managed to solve many key developmental issues, including the economic and refugee crises linked to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, the creation of an independent state and the process of Slovenia’s integration into the EU. There was hardly any Euroscepticism. Parliamentary parties signed a pact for collaboration in favour of more efficient fulfilment of the EU’s demands related to Slovenia’s integration into the EU. The only partial exception was the parliamentary extreme-right Slovenian National Party. And even this party declared itself to be Eurorealist and opted not to act against the integration.

Nevertheless, parties did engage in conflicts over the creation of the rules and conditions for capitalist development, especially the mode of privatization, and political control over the economy and mass media. The power relations (together with favourable socio-economic preconditions) allowed for the implementation of two combined strategies. The first was Slovenia’s defending from external pressures for shock therapy and privatization. The second was gradualism in reforms and maintaining relatively low levels of social inequalities.

However, besides many governing accomplishments, parties had also got involved in inter-party conflicts and scandals. This had not been well received by citizens (Fink-Hafner et al. 2002). The Liberal Democracy of Slovenia’s increasing involvement in corruption scandals and the expanding political polarization in the party system since the end of the 1990s contributed to the crisis of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia towards the end of the 1990s. In spite of the new Party of the Youth supporting the LDS government after its success at the 2000 elections, the implosion of the liberal centre and the emergence of a two-polar-party competition evolved.

Despite positive measures of democracy in this period, the described problems of governing probably contributed to the decline in trust in political institutions after 2000 (as shown in the previous chapter).

Destabilization of the Party System (2004–2008 Elections)

Having held a governmental position for a long time, and after multiple corruption scandals, the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia radically lost its support (it gained 23 seats in the 2004 elections and only five in the 2008 elections, 11 fewer than in 2000). The social rootedness of parties in terms of party membership had noticeably declined after 2000 with the exception of Janša’s Democratic Party (which reported a rise to 27,011 members by 2008) and the Democratic Party of Pensioners (with 14,210 members by 2008) (Krašovec 2014). Parties had been continuously dependent on state funding and acting in an environment with low party identity—only around 20% of voters felt close to a particular party (Toš 2007, 17).

All the parties had been more or less adapting to the neoliberal turn within the EU (Krašovec and Cabada 2018). This was in sharp contrast to the predominant values of social equality and support for a welfare state (as shown in the previous chapter). It was only Janša’s anti-communist party that very openly marked its ideological turn by shifting its programme more to the right, renaming itself the Slovenian Democratic Party and joining the European People’s Party.

In the process of the strengthening of the right’s ideological extreme after 2004, elements of a polarized and moderate party system (according to Sartori’s typology) mixed to varying degrees, with a rather high party system fragmentation, polarization on several long-term political issues while collaborating on other major political issues, the existence of a double opposition and ideological fever (Fink-Hafner 2023–in print).

The new Party for Real, which tried to revive the liberal centre, won nine seats in the 2008 elections. In the later elections, both the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia and the Party for Real failed to maintain their parliamentary position. In fact, the 2008 elections demonstrated the level of polarization in an unseen way (Table 7.2). The anti-communist Slovenian Democratic Party (28 seats) and the Social Democrats (the successors of the reformed Communist Party with 29 seats) gained nearly equal support. Other parties gained a much smaller number of seats.

With the crisis of the liberal centre, the percentage of valid votes for parliamentary parties with roots in socio-political organizations shrank from 48.3% after the 2000 elections to 33% in the 2004 elections and 35.7% in the 2008 elections (Table 7.1). By the 2008 elections, the cluster of parliamentary parties without roots in the socialist regime had contributed more to the centre-right than to the centre-left segment of the party system (Table 7.3).

On the one hand, the Slovenian Democratic Party (led by Janša) in the 2004–2008 period wanted to dismantle these old socio-politico-economic networks and thus announced a radical privatization, as well as adopting an adversarial stance towards its social partners (Guardiancich 2012). On the other hand, the Social Democrats’ government headed by Borut Pahor failed to respond in a timely manner to the 2008 international financial and economic crisis and, despite turning to social transfers to keep voters’ support, failed to remain in power for the full parliamentary mandate.

Although in 2008 the successor to the former regime party (Social Democrats) succeeded for the first—and so far the only—time in winning the elections and took over the executive power in a peaceful manner, this indicator of democratic consolidation (according to Linz 1990) was mixed with the emerging challenges to Slovenia’s democracy. Soon after the Social Democrats became the party of the PM, Janša’s party announced the programmatic idea of the Second Republic (SDS 2009).

Moreover, in the context of the 2008 international financial and economic crisis, a new cleavage had also evolved more clearly—the cleavage between the neoliberal understanding of the role of the state and the pro-welfare state orientation.

Continuous Radical Renewal of the Party System (2011–2022 Elections)

Between 2011 and 2022, elections took place in the context of the accumulation of many external pressures, particularly including the impacts of the international economic and financial crisis, the international migration crisis and the global COVID-19 crisis. Domestic factors presented in previous sections as well as external factors contributed to a series of early elections (2011, 2014 and 2018), unstable governments and the emergence of ever-new political parties based on individual political personalities just before the elections and substantial voters’ support for such parties (Table 7.3).

After these elections, six new parties entered the parliament. Nearly all of them tried to fill the liberal centre void: Gregor Virant’s Civic List; Positive Slovenia (led by Zoran Janković, at that time mayor of Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana); Miro Cerar’s Party (later renamed the Party of the Modern Centre); the Alliance of Alenka Bratušek (a splitter from Positive Slovenia, later renamed the Party of Alenka Bratušek); and the List of Marjan Šarec. It was only the Left that declared itself to be red-green. Only two parties of the first democratic decade maintained a continuous presence in the parliament: Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party and the Social Democrats.

Party social rootedness has been under stress. Not only did party membership generally decline after 2010 as in other post-socialist countries, but in Slovenia, it declined more than the average party membership in those other countries (Nikić Čakar and Čular 2023). While Janša’s Democratic Party succeeded in preserving party membership at around 30,000 members, other previously existing parties were losing party membership (Krašovec 2014) and the ever-new political parties failed to develop into proper organizations with a substantial membership. According to party funding reports, all parties, with the small exception of the Slovenian Democratic Party, have been fully dependent on state funding in an environment with a rather low party identity (in the period between 2012 and 2020, on average 33.4% of those surveyed responded positively that they felt closer to one particular party than to other parties) (Slovenian Public Opinion 2002–2022, 2003–2023). Nevertheless, parties have taken advantage of governing in circumstances of substantial remains of state ownership in economy.

In November 2023, the investigative committee of the National Assembly focused on Slovenian Democratic Party funding, published an Interim Report on Determining the Political Responsibility of Holders of Public Offices for Alleged Illegal Financing of Political Parties and Party Political Propaganda in the Media Before and During the Election of Deputies to the National Assembly in 2022 with the Financial Resources of State-Owned Enterprises, State Institutions and Foreign Entities (Preiskovalna komisija Državnega zbora Republike Slovenije 2023; see also Trampuš 2023, 24–26, 28; Weiss 2023, 27). It publicly revealed a peculiar ‘business model’ of party financing. It includes a network of various actors serving as facades for the party financing from domestic (state companies) as well as foreign (particularly Hungarian) sources, often making transactions using cash. These findings resonate with an increase in the V-Dem Clientelism Index in the period between 2019 and 2022 (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
A line graph traces the trend of the V-dem clientelism index in Slovenia versus the years from 1990 to 2022. The line fluctuates at the minimum value.

(Source V-Dem, Varieties of Democracy, at https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/CountryGraph/)

V-dem clientelism index

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Party system fragmentation changed, particularly the size of units of the party system. Individual parties (particularly several new ones) gained comparatively big shares of parliamentary seats in particular elections. In the 2011 elections, a new party, Positive Slovenia, gained 28 out of 88 seats (two parliamentary seats are reserved for Italian and Hungarian minority representatives) and another new party, Državljanska lista Gregorja Viranta, gained eight seats; in the 2014 elections, a new party, the Party of Miro Cerar, gained 36 seats, an old party, the United Left, gained six seats and another new party, the Party of Alenka Bratušek (a splinter of Positive Slovenia), won four seats; in the 2018 elections, a new party, Lista Marjana Šarca, gained 13 seats; and in the 2022 elections, another new party, the Freedom Movement (led by tycoon Robert Golob, a manager in the energy sector and in the rather distant past also a state secretary in Drnovšek’s government), won 41 parliamentary seats—the biggest number since the transition to democracy.

In spite of the many new parties declaring their centrist positioning since 2011, it has become increasingly difficult to identify the ideological-political positions of not only the new parties but also some of the older ones. The Social Democrats failed to further adapt to the changing society. Janša’s party (collaborating ever more closely with Orban’s party) additionally shifted towards the extreme right (Haughton and Krašovec 2013). It also intensified international collaboration with extreme-right political parties in Central European countries and beyond.

The party system has increasingly obtained the characteristics of polarized pluralism, especially regarding the erosion of a consensus on the constitutional system and the rise of what Sartori called ‘ideological fever’. The bipolar competition of the party system stabilized on the simplified axis of for or against Janša. During 2020 and 2021, the most recognizable blocks of parties on the anti-Janša vs Janša axis re-established themselves on the pro-liberal democracy block vs the de facto pro-Second Republic block axis led by Janša. Coalition partners in Janša’s government paid a high price for the enabling of Janša’s party. The Democratic Party of Pensioners not only lost the parliamentary position but also faced internal decomposition. The successor of the former Party of Miro Cerar (later renamed the Party of the Modern Centre) further disintegrated into the Konkretno party, which also failed to enter the parliament in the 2022 elections. New Slovenia hardly survived in the parliament and still struggles to distance itself from Janša’s party and is re-establishing itself as a clearly ideologically-politically profiled party.

Personalizing party politics and hollowing out programmatic characteristics of ever-new parties have gone hand in hand. Although new parties tended to present themselves as centrist and attempted to fill in the centrist positioning emptied after Liberal Democracy’s demise, they were actually ‘tabula rasa’ until they started making laws when in power. But this has not been the sole method of personalization in Slovenia’s politics. Another way has also been linked to Janša’s political nourishing of his victimhood (imprisonment in the transition period and imprisonment in 2014 for corruptive behaviour in buying Patria vehicles for Slovenia’s army). In the 2011–2022 period, personalistic parties and voters opting for such parties produced a vicious circle of voters’ disappointments and ever-new parties without proper resources for governing taking over government coalitions. For about a decade, the electoral competition was to a great extent reduced to the competition among political figures (new parties’ leaders) on the anti-Janša side vs Janša.

The context of further increasing the personalization of politics led to the current main political cleavage of Janša vs Golob (leader of the Freedom Movement). Besides the political competition, this also clearly includes open personal animosities and competition between the two as individuals.

Janša has been additionally building on presenting himself as a continuous political victim. His current victimhood has not been linked so much with his sacrifice by the old elite in Slovenia (leading to Janša’s imprisonment and appearing before the Yugoslav army court in Ljubljana). It has become more important that he was imprisoned for a short time in 2014 just before the elections for corruptive behaviour in purchasing Patria vehicles for Slovenia’s army, and more recently he received a court sentencing for attacking individual journalists and the leading person in the Slovenian Press Agency. Janša presents these sentences in light of his victimhood. He even invented a nickname for the judiciary: ‘krivosodje’ (‘Slovenian courts of misjustice’). Also, Janša has continuously pointed at the evil ‘udbo mafia’, ‘deep state’ and particularly ‘strici iz ozadnja’/ ‘uncles from the background’, referring indirectly also to the still active informal political role of Milan Kučan. Judiciary is not excluded from this perception of the world as ‘the plot’ (‘svet kot zarota’) (Hribar 2011).

In contrast, Golob resents Janša as a person and Janša’s followers. This is due to Golob’s revelation that Janša’s party did not allow him to continue heading the Gen-I company. Since taking over the government, Golob has been passionate about ‘cleaning the Janšists’ from state apparatus (particularly the police) (‘Golob o zaslišanju Tatjane Bobnar: Dogovorila sva se, da policijo očisti janšistov’ 2023; Mlakar 2023; ‘V SDS-u na nogah zaradi Golobove izjave o “čiščenju janšistov v policiji”’ 2023) and the national public radio and TV station (‘Golob besedo “janšisti” zamenjal z besedo “janšizem”’ 2023). Based on the belief that some of his collaborators, including one MP, ‘play for the other team’, Golob started a ‘cleaning’ of the Movement Svoboda party by excluding two individuals from the party and initiating changes in the party leadership (‘Iz stranke izključena dva člana, Klakočar Zupančičeva ni več podpredsednica’ 2023).

Party institutionalization has not only been eroded by the increasing personalization of parties but also due to many new parties evolving just before the elections as electoral committees led by new faces (Fink-Hafner and Krašovec 2019), a decline of parties with roots in the old system (from around 37% in the period between the 1990 and 1996 elections to 48.3% after the 2000 elections to between 5.98% and 10.52% in the period between 2011 and 2022) and even the deinstitutionalization of not-so-new parties from the 1990s (particularly Desus) (Table 7.1).

The creation of the Freedom Movement introduced a new party model. First, it brought about the novel practice of taking over a formerly existing but non-active political party (the Party of Green Actions—Stranka zelenih dejanj) based on an agreement with the party leadership and combined with (for Slovenia) quite substantial individual financial contributions. Such a practice has been nicknamed ‘the buying of parties’ (Vezjak 2022a, b). Particularly in the early stage of establishing the party, Svoboda Golob had embraced direct communication with representatives of the protest movements The Voice of People (‘Glas ljudstva’ n.d.; ‘Golob iniciativi Glas ljudstva zagotovil, da si vlada prizadeva za uresničevanje zavez’ 2022; Gov.si 2023). Furthermore, he had also used an unusual technocratic practice from the business milieu in the process of his cadre selection. More precisely, Golob has used Gallup tests for testing his future team members (Lovšin 2023). Golob still appears on the Gallup web page in a video supporting Gallup’s ideas on CliftonStrengths (Gallup 2023).

With a radical party system renewal, a difference in opportunities to take care of organizational institutionalization has contributed to a variety of party organizations. As ever, new parties entered government before organizational consolidation; they also lacked time for organizational consolidation, including the development of a party cadre pool. In contrast, older parties (Social Democrats and particularly Janša’s Democratic Party of Slovenia) with experiences of governmental and oppositional statuses have had a much longer period of time available for organizational maintenance and development.

Party system closure has been challenged. The government creation process under the leadership of a new party immediately after the elections has become even more difficult. The lack of a new parties’ cadre has brought about the rise of politically inexperienced Prime Ministers and ministers, unpredictable government formation and frequent government instability. Political debates on the need for early elections and the actual holding of early elections have become rather regular (held in 2011, 2014 and 2018). Prime Ministers from new parties introduced a new, stepping-down strategy (Krašovec and Krpič 2023). Alenka Bratušek from Positive Slovenia (she took over the prime ministerialship after Janša’s government had lost a vote of confidence), Miro Cerar (Miro Cerar’s Party/Party of the Modern Centre) and Miran Šarec (Miran Šarec’s List) did so when they unsuccessfully managed governments. This happened in circumstances when the governments had become ideologically more coherent and the political milieu more polarized in comparison to Slovenia’s governments and milieus during the 1990s. All of these Prime Ministers lacked political experience, unlike Drnovšek (a long-term Prime Minister during the 1990s with previous experience in Yugoslav politics and internationally).

The described problems have so far opened up opportunities for the second and third Janša's governments. The third Janša's government was enabled by a weak centre-left government (2018–2019) and its Prime Minister, Marjan Šarec’ (the List of Marjan Šarec), stepping down. Furthermore, Janša’s weak coalition partners (New Slovenia, Desus and the Party of the Modern Centre, which gradually transformed into a new centre-right party, Konkretno) enabled Janša’s implementation of some Second Republic programmatic elements in the context of managing the COVID-19 pandemic in exchange for support for a particular party’s (party leader’s) projects.

In this situation, the door opened for struggles around fundamental issues of democracy. However, it was only the empowerment of the weak centre-left parliamentary opposition by civil society pressures and the mobilization of broad citizen protest against Janša’s government that allowed for a change in the distribution of political power. A new party, the Freedom Movement (the Freedom Party in the making), established just before the 2022 elections by a group of people supporting Golob, won the national elections in collaboration with the centre-left civil society and oppositional parliamentary parties as well as with the help of citizens’ strategic anti-Janša voting.

A Comparative Longitudinal View

Party System Fragmentation

Party system fragmentation has been a long-term party system characteristic (Table 7.4). As already noted, the law adopted in 1989 not only legalized the previously existing oppositional proto-parties but also opened up a window for the quick formal establishment of numerous parties. However, not many of them have survived. In terms of the number of parties, the party system had been closer to polarized pluralism, for which the threshold is five to six parties. After the first free elections in 1990, nine parties entered the parliament and at that point no party could be considered irrelevant. From 1992 to the 2018 elections, the average number of parties was eight. The only exception so far was the 2022 elections, based on which only five parties entered the parliament and a single party (Freedom Movement) gained as many as 41 out of 88 (47%) parliamentary seats (Table 7.2).

Table 7.4 Party system and democracy in Slovenia—a dynamic view
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All in all, party system fragmentation does not tell us much about the qualitative changes in parties and party systems. This is because it had persisted for a long time at high levels when other changes in the party system evolved. When it radically changed with the lowest fractionalization after the 2022 elections, this again doesn’t reveal the qualities of the parties, particularly the fragility of the biggest unit (the newly established Freedom Movement). This finding is not novel as authors of early party system classifications had already come to the conclusion that the number of parties per se, even when amending for the size of parties, does not reveal enough about the key party system characteristics (Mair 1990).

Party and Party System Institutionalisation

Party institutionalization has been closely linked to the presence of parties with roots in the old system. Beside the reformed League of Communists (today Social Democrats), there were two other parties with roots in socio-political organizations in the frame of the old regime (they gained 37.1% of the votes in the 1990 elections). However, not all succeeded in adapting efficiently to the democratic framework and maintaining their parliamentary status in the following elections despite their pre-existing organizational networks and other organizational resources. The successors to the reformed League of Communists of Slovenia, and particularly to the reformed League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia, initially adapted very successfully to the new system. It was particularly due to the electoral success of the centre-left LDS that the cluster of parties with roots in the former regime rose from around 37% in the period between the 1990 and 1996 elections to 48.3% after the 2000 elections (Table 7.2). However, after a long-term governmental position and multiple corruption scandals, the party radically lost support and disappeared from parliament after 2011. In the period between 2011 and 2022, the Social Democrats (the only party with roots in socio-political organizations) only gained between 5.98% and 10.52% of the vote.

The new political parties that emerged in opposition to the previous regime (together gaining 54.8% of the votes in the 1990 elections) were initially poorly institutionalized (many of them emerged just before the elections), and many very soon ended up in the party graveyard. Some new parties also became successfully institutionalized (the centre-left Democratic Party of Pensioners, Janša’s anti-communist party—at that time named the Slovenian Social Democratic Party—and the extreme-right Slovenian National Party), while the conservative Slovenian People’s Party and the Christian Democratic Party tried to position themselves both separately and, for a time, as a single merged party.

In the 2000 elections, a new party, the Party of the Youth (supporting the LDS government), entered parliament for the first and last time. The new party For Real, which tried to revive the liberal centre after the LDS’s decline, won nine seats at the 2008 elections; however, both of these new parties failed to maintain their parliamentary position in the later elections. After the 2011, 2014 and 2018 elections, six new parties entered parliament: Gregor Virant’s Civic List, Positive Slovenia, Miro Cerar’s Party (later renamed the Party of the Modern Centre), the Alliance of Alenka Bratušek (later renamed the Party of Alenka Bratušek), the List of Marjan Šarec and the Left. While all the other new (and old) parties were quite adaptive to the EU’s post-financial crisis policies and did not offer a particularly articulated party platform, the Left was the only new party that introduced open criticism of the current capitalism. A radical stream within the Left has openly campaigned for some socialist ideas. The Left is also the only new party that remained in parliament after the 2022 elections. From the parties of the first democratic decade, only two parties maintained a continuous presence in parliament: Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party and the Social Democrats. Parties that have been even more extreme than Janša’s party have not succeeded in entering the parliament.

Personalization. The personalization of politics as the antithesis of routine and the institutionalization of political parties (Panebianco 1988, 53) had become an increasing characteristic of Janša’s party during the 1990s, but has radically soared over big shares of parties since the 2011 elections. Nevertheless, it is important that in general Slovenia’s citizens have not sympathized with Janša. He has been poorly rated in public opinion surveys. In contrast, in longitudinal Slovenian public opinion surveys, Milan Kučan and Janez Drnovšek have been continuously recognized as politicians with a much higher reputation than any other politician. At the maximum, Janša’s party has gained 29 seats (33%).

Many new parties evolved just before the elections as electoral committees led by publicly recognizable new faces, and many were even named after the party leaders (Fink-Hafner and Krašovec 2019). The personalization of politics has gone as far as the most recent political cleavage formed between two personalities: Janez Janša and Robert Golob. Moreover, it also rests on personal animosities between the two. Golob decided to step into politics after Janša’s government had prevented him from gaining another mandate as president of the managing board of Gen-I (a lucrative company in the field of energy, which planned to expand through the solarization of Slovenia) (Černic 2011; ‘Golob ni bil vnovič imenovan za direktorja Gen-I-ja, začasno upravo lahko imenuje tudi sodišče’ 2021; Mekina 2021; ‘Robert Golob: če ne na vrh GEN-I, pa v vrh slovenske politike?’ 2021; ‘Robert Golob meni, da je državni GEN-I s koncem njegovega mandata obsojen na propad’ 2021; ‘Vroče vprašanje: gre Robert Golob v politiko?’ 2021; Šimac 2022; ‘Kako je nastal Gen-I’ 2023; Šurla 2023). There are beliefs that Golob did that for revenge as well as that Janša and Golob’s personalities are revanchist (Bizilj 2023).

Party social roots. Party social rooting has been a challenge since the transition. This has been expressed in low party membership (Table 7.4), a low percentage of party identity, and distrust of politics, parties and parliament (as shown in the chapter on evaluation of democracy in Slovenia). Early establishment of party state funding contributed to the development of state-dependent parties (Krašovec and Haughton 2011). However, the hyper party system renewal since 2011 has enhanced the lack of parties’ social roots. This, along with ever-new voters’ disappointment with parties, led to a decline in election turnout and substantial lost votes (not represented in parliament). At the last elections, the proportion of lost votes was as much as a quarter of the votes cast (Table 1) while the turnout was the highest since the 2004 elections (Table 7.3).

Government formation and the related party system closure. Due to the proportional system, governments have often included a large number of parties (Table 7.1). Government formation and the related closure of the party system was already an issue during the 1990s (Table 7.2). But the centre-left LDS managed to form and lead governments, which often included parties from both the left and the right (Zajc 2009). Drnovšek even invented a formula for a separate coalition agreement with two parties, which could not have been otherwise both included into the government due to deep ideological differences among them.

But it has been particularly since the centre-right government led by Janša (2004–2008) that the government formation and stability has become increasingly unpredictable (Zajc 2015). Unpredictability in the parliamentary party system caused by completely new parties entering the parliament has directly translated into unpredictability of parties of the Prime Minister. Unpredictability has also occurred due to unknown capabilities of Prime Ministers (“new faces”) for leading coalition governments and governments’ survival throughout the whole four-year mandate.

Governments also became even more unpredictable than at any time in the past. In spite of the fact that in 2011 Positive Slovenia gained 28 out of 88 seats, it was not able to form a government (Zajc 2013). However, after Janša’s government’s vote of confidence it was Positive Slovenia that provided the Prime Minister (Bratušek). In contrast, when in the 2014 elections the Party of Miro Cerar gained 36 seats it successfully formed the government. When in the 2018 elections, Janša’s party gained the biggest share of votes, it was not able to form a government. Also, the Lista Marjana Šarca, which gained 13 seats, had not only had a hard time in forming the government but also in successfully managing it (Zajc 2020). As already noted, Šarec stepped down and Janša’s government was formed without holding elections right at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It appeared that the government formation based on the 2022 elections with the Freedom Movement (led by Robert Golob) wining 41 seats would take place in a quite straightforward manner. However, the government formation brought about the rather surprising inclusion of the former Alenka Bratušek’s and Šarec’s party including both leaders in spite of the fact that their parties had lost their parliamentary status in the 2022 elections. Voters, in particular, who chose to vote for the Freedom Movement and not for either of the two parties did not see this as a transparent evolution of the Freedom Movement.

Unlike any government in the past, the current centre-left government coalition, with a safe parliamentary majority led by the Freedom Movement, has faced the blocking of its formation. Janša’s party-initiated referendum on the law establishing the organization of Freedom’s government. So, Golob’s government was formed in line with its initially adopted law only in January 2023.

Polarization

In spite of the fact that the party system was very fragmented, and each party competed individually, the competition at first was primarily bipolar (communism vs anti-communism). In the frame of three-polar party competition, which evolved after the 1992 elections, the centre-left LDS (a social-liberal party) established itself as an integrating actor of the centre-left and the centre-right governmental coalition partners. In this period, Slovenia’s party system was found to be among the least polarized Central European post-socialist countries (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2011, 134–135).

However, this exceptionalism in Slovenia changed after the first post-transitional decade. While various measures of polarization may differ, it has been polarization expressed in V-Dem measures that has particularly risen and stayed quite high since 2012, almost achieving the maximum value between 2020 and 2022 (Malčič 2023, 31–32). Public opinion surveys have shown that polarization has not been limited to party politics but has also significantly increased among Slovenians (Jou 2011, 36–37; Malčič 2023, 33). The combined party and citizen polarization has created a division of Slovenia's politics into two not only opposing, but also increasingly hostile political camps tolerating and using hate speech (Vehovar et al. 2012; Vezjak 2018; Šulc and Šori 2020; Ratajec 2021). The increasing levels of hate speech have often evolved, especially as a result of Janša’s and Janša’s party instrumentalization of Twitter and anti-Janša actors reacting to it.

Nevertheless, looking at political life, it should be noted that during the first post-transitional decade, parties did engage in conflicts over the creation of the rules and conditions for capitalist development, especially the mode of privatization, political control over the economy and mass media. This, together with the crisis of the LDS and the expanding political polarization in the party system since the end of the 1990s, contributed to the implosion of the liberal centre and the emergence of two-polar-party competition, particularly expressed in the 2000 elections.

During the 1992–2000 period, Janša’s party particularly articulated elements of polarized pluralism, including challenging the existing political institutions (questioning the legitimacy of elections, demanding the introduction of a majoritarian electoral system and hinting at the former regime politicians and institutions as still influential actors beside the scenes) (Hribar 2011). The 2000 election campaign also clearly indicated that Janša’s party was moving towards the more extreme right by misusing the issues of many marginal social groups.

With the strengthening of the right’s ideological extreme after 2004, elements of a polarized and moderate party system (according to Sartori’s typology) mixed to various degrees (high party system fragmentation, polarization on several long-term political issues while collaborating on the adoption of the euro, the existence of a double opposition and ideological fever) (Fink-Hafner, 2023–in print). The 2008 elections expressed the level of polarization in nearly equal support for the anti-communist Slovenian Democratic Party (28 seats) and the Social Democrats (the successors to the reformed Communist Party with 29 seats). Other parties gained much smaller numbers of seats.

Several elements have enhanced the party system characteristics of polarized pluralism, especially the erosion of a consensus on the constitutional system and the rise of what Sartori named ‘ideological fever’. The bipolar competition party system stabilized on the simplified axis of those against or in favour of Janša.

During the last parliamentary mandate (2018–2022), the centre-left was weak not only as a government but also as a parliamentary opposition during the COVID-19 crisis. Since 2021, the most recognizable blocks of parties on the anti-Janša vs Janša axis have re-established themselves on the pro-liberal democracy block vs the de facto pro-Second Republic block axis led by Janša. Parties have struggled de facto around the fundamental issues of democracy.

Ideological characteristics of the party system and party blocks. As already noted, in the fragmented party system, a full rainbow of ideological orientations without extremes had been presented: reformed socialist and communist, green, Christian democrat, conservative–agrarian, anti-communist social democrat and regional parties, as well as parties representing craftsmen. The bipolar structure somewhat softened due to the 1990 election results. As the largest proportion of votes went to the transformed League of Communists with a programme entitled ‘Europe Now’, the former party of the socialist regime participated in governing. Slovenian parties collaborated beyond their ideological boundaries to solve critical national issues while establishing a national democratic political system and an independent state.

During the 1992–2008 period, parties without roots in the previous regime empowered the centre-right cluster more than that of the centre-left in the party system. While parties had been more or less adapting to the neoliberal turn within the EU (Krašovec and Cabada 2018), it was Janša’s anti-communist party that very clearly marked this turn by shifting its programme to the right, renaming itself the Slovenian Democratic Party and becoming a member of the European People’s Party. More recently, Janša’s party (collaborating ever more closely with Orbán's party) shifted towards the extreme right (Haughton and Krašovec 2013), so that the extreme-right Slovenian National Party only succeeded in returning to parliament for a very short time. Even more extreme new parties have unsuccessfully competed at elections since 2011.

In spite of many new parties’ attempts since 2011 to fill the liberal centre void, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the ideological-political positions not only of new parties (Positive Slovenia, the Party of Miro Cerar, the Party of the Modern Centre and the Freedom Movement) but also some of the older parties without roots in the old socio-political organizations. This was particularly the case with the Democratic Party of Pensioners and the Christian Democratic New Slovenia. The Social Democrats had lost themselves in the ‘third way’, like many European social democratic parties. So the most obvious opposition to Janša’s party has appeared to be the red-green Left, a part of the newly emerging European radical left. Movement Svoboda’s position is first and foremost the anti-Janša position. It remains to be seen from its policies and politics what it really stands for.

Key Findings Based on Comparing Changing Party Systems

Party system fragmentation has been a long-term feature of Slovenia’s party system and does not seem to function as a political factor of party system change in the frame of a long-enduring proportional electoral system. Rather, it appears that there are institutionalization and polarization, which may matter.

In the period 1993–2021, Slovenia’s party system had been among the European countries with the highest parliamentary fragmentation, the highest numbers of new parties, above-average electoral volatility, low electoral disproportionality, about average party system closure and low polarization (Casal Bértoa 2023). While such measures may help in understanding Slovenia’s party politics from an international comparative perspective, they don’t offer a more refined view, which may be crucial for the understanding of radical changes in democracy.

When looking into institutionalization, of course, it should be noted that Slovenia’s party system has never been highly institutionalized. However, there have only been two periods when new parties have taken a big share of the party system: the transitional and post-2011 periods. Slovenia’s case also shows that the direction of changing institutionalization matters. While in the transitional stage the overall trend was the institutionalization of both parties and party system, the deinstitutionalization process initially included political parties. However, the increasing share of poorly institutionalized parties has also damaged the institutionalization of the overall party system. Even more, such processes have brought about a large turnout of MPs and government cadre, including also politically inexperienced Prime Ministers. All these together damages party system closure—as has been particularly obvious since the 2011 early elections.

Slovenia’s findings also speak against the general thesis that it is not the institutionalization of parties that matters, but rather the institutionalization of a party system. The question is whether there is a particular ‘threshold’ of individual party deinstitutionalization and a newly emerging party poor institutionalization, which may distinguish between an institutionalized party system, a deinstitutionalized party system and a sufficiently institutionalized party system.

Furthermore, Slovenia’s experiences show that with radical deinstitutionalization of parties and a party system, the issue of a political profession may appear on the agenda again several decades after the transition to democracy. New parties in their early stages lack their own political cadre and their leaders tend to lack skills for managing coalitions and the state as well as for efficient securing of their interests beyond the nation state. So, a lack of political knowledge and skills is not a phenomenon that is for ever dealt with in the process of transition and consolidation.

While the bipolar competition has been characteristic of the same two periods, after 2004 bipolarity had been replacing the tripolar competition for most of the 1990s. Furthermore, it was during the first Janša government (2004–2008) that the personalization of party politics had gained new impetus. It was primarily about the anti-Janša stand. However, after the demise of Pahor’s (Social Democrats) government (2008–2011), it not only evolved into several parties’ general rejection of collaboration with Janša based on a principle (since 2014), but it also actually evolved into the recent cleavage between two political personalities. So, the critical political problem in Slovenia appears to lie in increasing competition among political personalities instead of among ideas on solving social problems and on Slovenia’s overall development.

To conclude, fragmentation, deinstitutionalization (including personalization) and polarization do not appear to be sufficiently strong factors for explaining a long-term party system dynamic. This becomes obvious when we take into account the findings from both this chapter and the chapter on evaluation of democracy in the changing context, which also takes into account citizens’ points of view and non-party actors’ behaviour.

From this chapter we have learned that simply counting parties and looking at quantifiable characteristics predominantly covered in party literature misses an important party quality, namely the relationship of parties with society and with the state. In Slovenia, parties have been creating an ever-bigger gap between themselves and citizens in several main ways. First, they have actively reduced their representative role in managing the society, including managing the impacts of external pressures. They have betrayed citizens’ expectations of a well-functioning economy, low social inequality, and ideologically-politically moderate and honest politics.

Furthermore, we found that party models (particularly linking parties with the state in circumstances with a substantial proportion of state-owned economic entities) matter a lot for the implementation of a representative role of parties as well as for the level of political corruption (which is damaging in itself for democracy). In contrast, in 2022, Slovenia experienced for the first time a wealthy individual organizing a party together with some other individuals contributing their financial shares. This is a phenomenon that is at least to some extent contrary to the predominant party dependency on state financing. Although this practice is very far from the experiences of other parts of the world, it is linked with the emergence of increasing social inequalities in the frame of current capitalist developments (Frank 2023).

When we integrate the findings from this chapter and the chapter on evaluation of democracy and contextual factors, we can empirically substantiate the increasing gap between citizens’ expectations and party governing effects. In Slovenia, it has been since 2004 that citizens have been increasingly dissatisfied with party governing leading to economic problems and the decline of social equality, let alone political scandals.

About two decades ago already, Mair (2005) exposed the problematic representative decline in Western democratic countries and on the EU level. However, over about a quarter of a century since the transition to democracy, Mair’s warning has also become a burning issue in Slovenia and probably also in many other post-socialist countries. So have the warnings about the increasing financial secrecy system, which has distorted capitalism and its elites’ relationship with taxation and the public realm, so that it conceals kleptocracy, crime and foreign interference as well as exacerbating inequality (Davidson and Judah 2023).

Slovenia's findings also resonate with warnings that politicians’ personal qualities and experiences matter for democracy, and that in a partisan political context where a politician might violate their sense of what is morally right, voters are likely much less concerned about morality if the politician is a co-partisan (McCoy et al. 2018; Walter and Redlawsk 2019, 2023).

This is why we call for taking into account a bigger picture when studying party governing. Such a study needs to go beyond only studying party and party system characteristics. In the concluding chapter, we summarize our findings on party and non-party factors of democracy and suggest some ideas for further research.