Where a media crisis and a health crisis collide

March 3: Janez Janša approved as new Prime Minister by a parliamentary vote.

This is not a story about social distancing in Slovenia, the often-ignored cradle of the American First Lady. 

Instead, this is a story about how this small country, with a population of just over 2 million, faces a threat to its independent press when it needs it most.

This past spring, a reshuffling of the government brought to power a close ally of Viktor Orbán, the strongman of Hungary, Slovenia’s larger eastern neighbor. When center-left Prime Minister Marjan Šarec resigned in January, he called for early elections. Instead, a right-wing populist formed a coalition with three other parties, creating a large enough bloc to govern. The parliament voted on these changes, but there were no national elections. On March 4, Slovenia woke up to a new Prime Minister and its first case of Covid-19. 

Many were nervous about this change of power. I was among them. 

Slovenia is now led by the right-wing populist Slovenian Democratic Party (known by the abbreviation of its name in Slovenian, SDS) and its leader of 27 years, Janez Janša. In Slovenia’s snap election in 2018, this party received 24.92 percent of the vote (the highest percentage in that election) after campaigning on a platform of decentralization and nationalism. Janša himself served jail time in 2014 for allegedly taking a bribe in an arms deal. His sentence was temporarily suspended and later overturned, however, by the Slovenian Constitutional Court.

Janša was also known for his aggressive stance against media freedom, something that I have first-hand experience with. 

In 2012, an earlier SDS government started prosecuting me for allegedly revealing state secrets in an investigation published by the country’s main daily newspaper, Delo, at the end of 2011. My stories showed that Slovenian members of the global neo-Nazi movement Blood & Honor were active in SDS's ranks and also in its 2011 election campaign.

I found, for example, the informal leader of Blood & Honor Slovenia was the vice president of SDS's local youth party in the rural town of Žiri, and a member of the campaign staff of SDS' parliamentary candidate, Irena Tavčar.

We published these stories shortly before the election. Janša’s party came in second, but the winner, Zoran Janković, was not able to form a coalition government. In the power vacuum that resulted, Janša got his chance and formed his own.

During the first session of his 2012 government, Janša removed the head of the national intelligence and security agency, SOVA, and installed his own, Damir Črnčec. He spent the first weeks setting up an internal investigation into the alleged sources of my stories. By that summer, SOVA filed a criminal complaint against me for allegedly publishing its classified information in my stories. The offense was punishable by up to three years in prison.

When Mr. Črnčec received the report of the internal investigation team indicating no wrongdoing, he rejected it, saying that it should be redone and the authors should be on the lookout for any hint of criminal activity. This document was among the documents that the state filed in the court process, as I have earlier written.

My trial ended in April of 2015. The state prosecution pulled all charges, citing lack of evidence. The prosecutor then proceeded to talk in court about how I was guilty, but that she could not prove it. (The criminal code was later changed to allow the publication of state secrets under very strict conditions.)

More recently, attacks against the media and journalists harboring “wrong facts and opinions” have continued as has a general disregard for the freedom of the press. In 2016 the current prime minister called two female journalists who work for Slovenia’s public broadcaster “presstitutes” on Twitter and published “prices” for their “services”.

While the press has been subject to more and more public attacks, Slovenian media outlets have been bought up by media tycoons with close ties to Hungary’s rightwing leader, Viktor Orbán, who is himself an ally of Janša. A mainstay of the Slovenian right, the weekly Demokracija, was among the organizations purchased by those tycoons.

Slovenian police have been investigating the financing of Hungarian-owned media since 2018. There are also currently ongoing investigations of suspected money laundering en route from Hungary through Slovenia and into North Macedonia to finance media outlets controlled by Orbàn’s associates.

But the reshuffling of the government may have hindered these investigations. 

At the end of January of this year, the center-left Prime Minister Marjan Šarec unexpectedly resigned. He said that his minority government, with a center-left platform, had too little support to pass structural reforms. He called for new elections. But instead, politicians in the parliament reshaped the government around a populist leader. 

With the government reshuffle, the new interior minister overseeing the police is now Aleš Hojs, a former defense minister in Janša’s previous government. Until recently he was director of Nova24TV.si, one of the two media organizations that allegedly received the Hungarian money that is the subject of a police investigation, as reported by Slovenian media.

One of the first things that Hojs did when he became interior minister was dismiss the general director of the police formally overseeing the investigation involving his party. 

The state of media freedom in Slovenia has declined considerably in recent months, according to watchdogs like the International Press Institute (IPI). Just three days ago, the government published a statement by the Prime Minister declaring himself at "war with the media”. (Other coalition parties distanced themselves from this, stating that they had no prior knowledge of the statement.)

What has sounded the alarm at IPI are threats that Prime Minister Janez Janša issued to the public Radiotelevision Slovenia on Twitter. He called RTV Slovenia's reporters liars who misled the public about the pandemic and were paid too well. 

Janša and his party were possibly unnerved by journalistic inquiries into public procurement conducted by the government in order to curb the pandemic.

At the end of March, the government centralized public procurement for the country in the Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Commodity Reserves, a small public agency with little experience conducting urgent large-scale public procurement.

Soon after the government did this, it came to light through investigative reporting, including that of my publication Oštro, that the government often ordered protective equipment from intermediaries, rather than actual producers or contractors.

The largest contract, worth around 31 million euro ($33.5 million), was scored by a company, Public Digital Infrastructure, owned by the Slovenian gaming mogul Joc Pečečnik who also owns a company called Interblock Gaming that is licensed in Nevada. The company was to provide millions of protective masks, clothing, gloves and goggles, according to a document from the Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Commodity Reserves.

When the first flight came in, governmental ministers were ecstatic. The economy, defense and health ministers took photographs with Pečečnik and the long-awaited FFP2 protective masks. There was the defense minister taking a picture of Pečečnik in front of the cargo. There were moments of release and unbridled jubilation on television.

It didn’t take long, however, for journalists to dig up sobering facts: The FFP2 masks provided in millions by a Chinese producer to Pečečnik were the wrong ones. An FFP2 classification was printed on them, even the CE and FDA compliance marks, but inside the packaging were ordinary surgical masks. 

Reached by cell phone on May 14, 2020, Joc Pečečnik said that as soon as he realized that the wrong masks had been shipped, he contacted the Chinese contractor and that they admitted their mistake. But, he said, the government still wished to use the surgical masks for old age homes and a new deal was brokered.

More recently, the attention abruptly shifted to an employee of the aforementioned Agency for Commodity Reserves. The man, Ivan Gale, said in a television talk show that agency employees received direct threats and pressures from governing politicians who pushed them to award contracts to specific companies with whom the politicians were friendly. 

And, Gale said, none of this out-of-control public procurement would have been possible without the involvement of the highest echelons of the Slovenian political establishment. Since then he has been revealing names of officials, their associates or family members who were forwarding various offers around. The prime minister’s wife Urška Bačovnik Janša, for example, wrote to the minister of the economy to broker a deal on medical equipment with a Slovenian company selling mangosteen juice imported from China.

Yet, media outlets with close ties to the government, like Nova24TV.si, continue to paint this government's rule under the pandemic as one of success, liberation and order. Just last week, Nova24TV.si circulated a petition in support of the current government: “Slovenia is one of the best countries in the European Union in the fight against coronavirus.”

A few days ago Janša got his phone-in TV show on Nova24TV. It’s called A Talk with the Prime Minister. It will run prime-time, every Monday.