A motion of no confidence was filed on Friday against the Slovenian government of conservative Janez Jansa, accused of carelessness and authoritarian drift while this country has recorded a very high number of deaths linked to the coronavirus.
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This motion, carried by five center-left formations, was supported by 42 deputies out of 90, and will have to be the subject of a secret ballot in Parliament before January 22.
“
The government has been exceptionally ineffective in tackling the epidemic,
” said Karl Erjavec, leader of the opposition DESUS party representing retirees.
Thursday, he had asked on television: "
should we continue to support the brutal and populist policy of Jansa (...) which will lead us to the Orbanization of Slovenia?"
», Referring to the Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an ally of Janez Jansa criticized for his attacks on checks and balances.
After ruling Slovenia twice in the 2000s, Janez Jansa returned to power at the end of February, in coalition with three other formations, taking advantage of the collapse of a previous center-left alliance.
He aligned himself with Viktor Orban's positions regarding the refusal of the right to asylum, while one of the external borders of the European Schengen free movement area is located in Slovenia.
He is using his Twitter account to attack media questioning his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
In December, Minister of Health Tomaz Gantar, who represented DESUS in the government, resigned, accusing him of using the fight against the epidemic to weaken the media.
Following the departure of a party that called for stricter restrictions to contain the coronavirus, its government only had a slim majority in Parliament, with 46 seats out of 90.
But according to Slovenian newspapers, several deputies rallied to Janez Jansa in early 2020 would now also like to bring him down.
For his part, the Prime Minister regretted that the opposition opened a political crisis at the height of the pandemic.
Among the hardest-hit countries, Slovenia is second in terms of the number of deaths relative to its population, with 149 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, behind Belgium (175).