EUPopLink Country report - Slovenia

Abstract

This country report examines the situation in the field of Euroscepticism and populism in Slovenia between the onset of global financial crisis in 2008 and the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2023. Various studies have shown that, since Slovenia’s accession to the European Union, the role of EU-related topics in national political debates in Slovenia has gradually increased. In the initial post-accession period, both hard and soft Eurosceptic positions occasionally emerged; however, these were typically sporadic or isolated from mainstream political discourse. Such attitudes significantly intensified with the onset of the global financial and economic crisis, and later during the migrant crisis, followed by a series of subsequent crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the energy crisis. Polycrisis period in Slovenia has fueled rise of populism and populist actors. In times since the financial crisis, several new political parties were formed shortly before elections; these parties generally lacked a comprehensive political programme and presented various ideas in a style that could be characterised as populist, while migration crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic further contributed to an intensification of populist discourse among certain political actors.