Jansa’s Media War is a Dead End for Slovenia

To understand Jansa's war with the media, it is important to recognise that his political capital rests on the ideological basis of nationalism, which substantiates national sovereignty by the principle of ethnicity.

A man looks at Slovenian newspapers. Photo: EPA/IGOR KUPLJENIK

This is contrary to the idea of liberal democracy, based on ​​the sovereignty of citizens, opposite to the nation as the organic category.

Democracy presupposes freedom of choice between different interests by different social groups; nationalist ideology is based on the link between nation and territory.

Jansa has used the nominal transformation of the old Yugoslav one-party system into a quasi-plural society, characterized as a multi-party system, to hide his intention to create a new form of authoritarian state organisation.

The first moves in this direction in Slovenia occurred shortly after independence in 1992, with the erasure of a large number of people as citizens, based on the same policy that Jansa advocates today.

This policy is based on the assumption that the nation, as the primary element of identification, takes precedence over the individual.

National interest is placed above the rights and freedoms of citizens - especially above those of artists, cultural figures, immigrants, Roma, homosexuals, socialists, etc -  although the discourse of Jansa's supporters is full of slogans about human rights and freedoms that are (symptomatically) always violated when it involves "conscious" Slovenes.

State domination over citizens is an element that is common to both communist and nationalist ideologies. Both employ totalitarian mechanisms of governance: from unconditional loyalty to the party to the personality cult of the...