Pensioners Party Quits Slovenia Coalition in Blow to Jansa

The council of the Slovenian Pensioners' Party, DeSUS, voted on Thursday to leave the right-wing coalition led by Janez Jansa of the Slovenian Democratic Party, SDS, and back new party leader Karl Erjavec as a candidate for the post of prime minister-designate.

"We are not leaving the coalition because of the epidemic or the work of ministers but because of the policy conducted by [Prime Minister and SDS leader] Janez Jansa, which goes in the direction of dismantling some systems," Erjavec told the media, adding that the party membership was dissatisfied with the Jansa government's ideology, its attacks on the media, and its close relations with Hungary and Poland.

"We do not want the 'Orbanization' of Slovenia, we do not want an autocratic system, we do not want people to be afraid," he said, referring to the autocratic Hungarian leader Viktor Orban.

He said the DeSUS ministers, the Health Minister and Agriculture Minister, will not resign for now, as it is up to the Prime Minister to decide that.

Erjavec, a former foreign minister and a newly elected DeSUS president, said the party had decided to support him as a candidate for prime minister within an initiative called the Constitutional Arch Coalition, KUL, which is the brainchild of economist Joze Damijan, to form an alternative to the right-wing government of Jansa.

The KUL coalition, formed in October, is comprised of the centre-left opposition parties List of Marjan Sarec, the Social Democrats, the Alenka Bratusek Party and the Left party.

"Without DeSUS, Jansa still has [the support of] 46 [of 90] MPs, so the government is not fully threatened," Alem Maksuti, a political scientist, told BIRN.

"It does not change much in terms of the fall of the government;...