Slovenia’s parliament has approved Janez Janša as the country’s new prime minister, returning the veteran conservative politician to power for his third stint leading the small central European nation of two million people. Janša, 67, leads the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), which is a member of the European People’s Party at EU level. His previous governments — in 2004–2008 and 2012–2013 and 2020–2022 — were characterised by economic liberalisation in the first term and mounting tension with Brussels and domestic press freedom advocates in the later tenures. The European Commission under both Juncker and von der Leyen flagged rule-of-law concerns about Slovenia under Janša, placing it in a cluster of attention alongside Hungary and Poland. His return follows the collapse of a centre-left government under Robert Golob, which came to power in 2022 on a wave of anti-Janša sentiment but struggled with energy prices, austerity pressures, and internal coalition fragmentation. Al Jazeera reported that parliament approved the appointment on Friday.
The received wisdom
The progressive framing of Janša’s return is well-rehearsed and not without basis in fact. He is a close ally of Viktor Orbán, has been convicted twice of corruption charges (both subsequently overturned on appeal in disputed circumstances), and his previous government drew sustained criticism for political pressure on the public broadcaster RTV and attempts to influence funding to friendly media outlets. Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders both lowered Slovenia’s press freedom rankings during his 2020–2022 government. The Golob government that displaced him was explicitly positioned as a restoration of liberal democratic norms. The received wisdom says: Slovenia had a near-miss with democratic backsliding, narrowly escaped, and has now voluntarily returned to the danger zone. The concern is compounded by geopolitics — Janša has been a vocal Atlanticist and Ukraine supporter in the past, but his alliance with Orbán, who remains the primary Trojan horse for Russian interests inside NATO, creates uncertainty about whether that support will persist.
This reading reflects genuine anxieties that are not merely elite projection. Press freedom matters. Judicial independence matters. These are not soft liberal preferences; they are the operating infrastructure of a functioning market economy.
A different read
But the Golob interlude deserves more honest scrutiny than it typically receives in English-language commentary.
Golob came to power in April 2022 with a landslide — his Freedom Movement won 41 seats in a 90-seat parliament, an extraordinary result for a political newcomer. The headline narrative was democratic renewal; the subtext was that energy prices had tripled, Slovenes were furious about inflation, and the centre-left was the available vehicle for expressing that fury. It was, in other words, less a mandate for liberalism than a protest vote in a different direction. When the Golob government then struggled with the same structural pressures — NATO defence spending commitments eating into social budgets, energy-price inflation, the fiscal constraints imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact — it had no ideological anchor to fall back on beyond its opposition to Janša.
The pattern here is broadly European. In country after country since 2022, liberal or centre-left governments that came to power on post-populist restoration platforms have discovered that restoring procedural norms does not insulate them from economic disappointment. Italy’s Meloni government, for all the alarm it generated on election, has been more fiscally conventional and Atlanticist than feared. Poland’s Tusk government is finding that unwinding the PiS-era judicial changes is constitutionally and politically harder than campaigning against them. The lesson is not that national conservatism is correct — it is that the liberal-democratic restoration narrative oversells what restoring procedural norms can actually deliver to ordinary voters.
Janša’s Atlanticism is, in this context, the more interesting story. Unlike Orbán — who has made his accommodation with Moscow a point of ideological differentiation — Janša has historically been a hawkish supporter of NATO and an early enthusiast for arming Ukraine. If that commitment persists into a third government, Slovenia under Janša may actually be more useful to the Western alliance than Slovenia under a fractured liberal coalition. The Guardian’s European reporting has documented the widening gap between the EU’s aspirational security commitments and its actual defence spending, a gap that the Trumpian pressure on NATO has now made existential. A Slovenian government that spends 2% of GDP on defence and votes for Ukraine aid in Brussels may be worth more to the alliance than a politically cleaner government that hedges.
The European Commission’s rule-of-law monitoring framework, which is the main institutional lever available to Brussels, has had uneven results. Hungary remains under Article 7 proceedings that have stretched for years without resolution. The framework works best as a deterrent and worst as a remedy once backsliding has occurred. What it cannot do is make a government popular with its own electorate by Brussels fiat.
What to watch
The first test of this government is whether Janša moves quickly to reopen the RTV governance structures — the public broadcaster control point that was his most politically sensitive act last time. A move on RTV would signal that the press-freedom concerns are substantive. Inaction would suggest they were overstated.
Watch also Slovenia’s vote on EU Ukraine aid packages and its NATO spending trajectory. If Janša the Atlanticist outperforms Janša the press-freedom liability, the EU’s rule-of-law alarm system will face its own credibility question. And watch whether the Orbán alliance deepens or whether Janša, feeling the different pressures of a third term, tries to differentiate his brand of conservatism from Budapest’s.
— J