Poldemocracy

Every serious camper, scout, hiker or treasure hunter knows that if you want to get somewhere, you first need to know where you are. Orientation is an important thing; if you don’t know where north is, you may well end up wandering in circles and running away from ticks, panthers and bears. That is why people since time immemorial have looked for various ways to work out where they are. We all know about the North Star, moss on the north side of trees, the compass, the sextant and, nowadays, of course, the GPS on our smartphones. If anyone still manages to get lost today, they are either very clumsy or doing it on purpose.

Let us now imagine, for the purposes of this text, a group of people who have decided to forget the stars, moss and GPS and rely for orientation solely on the loudest and most unruly man among them. Since he is an imaginary person, let us call him, for the purposes of this text, Polde. In this group without a compass, all the points of the compass are determined by Polde. North is always where he is, and south is where he isn’t. Those who don’t like Polde run south, but since he isn’t necessarily where they think he is, they can easily get lost, trip over a root and fall flat on their faces. Then there are those who claim they want to go neither north nor south but forward, but since they have no idea where or what forward is, out of caution or opportunism they prefer to hold on to the sleeve of Polde’s jacket, buttoned with both buttons. Polde, of course, enjoys this, because he is the alpha male who decides where the sun rises and sets, where it is warm and where it is cold. The longer all his fellow travelers run back and forth looking for a way out of the confusion, the longer he remains the one who sets the rules of the game, since the rules of the game are set around him.

This clumsy parable is, of course, a comment on the state of the pluralist democracy we have managed to put together in thirty years of an independent state. Without critical reflection on who is really on the left, who on the right and who in the center, we orient ourselves solely by Polde. The right is where Polde is, and the right is whatever Polde is. On the other side, everyone who doesn’t like Polde is automatically a leftist, including those who dislike him from the right. The problem of many of Polde’s competitors is that, being busy with Polde, they run out of time to conceptualize their political beliefs and pour them into a convincing political program. But that way, of course, they get nowhere. Anti-Poldism is not a political platform but a mirror image operated by someone else on your behalf.

In the Slovenian political Baghdad, the caliphs want to become Iznogoud instead of Iznogoud. The cleverest idea that those who dislike Polde have come up with in the last thirty years is to find someone who will beat Polde by being even more Polde than he is. Slovenian politics is trapped in an exhausting battle between faces, repeated ad nauseam, and cannot find its way to a democracy of programs and ideas.

Between Polde and those who dislike him a large empty space has opened up, which some sell as the political center. But since in Slovenia we measure political space geometrically, not by values, our center—and many who claim to belong to it—often has little in common with the political groupings and programs found in this part of the political spectrum in functioning democracies. Here, rather, we come across politicians and parties that see the center as a vacuum of values, an opportunity for political opportunism, without a program, without commitments to voters and without values.

If the “center” of Slovenian politics is more colorful than the snack bar at the railway station, at its extreme edges the situation is exactly the opposite. There, again because of the doctrine of respecting absolutely all different opinions, by default there can be no one. With perhaps two exceptions. The first concerns expressions of concern about the undermining of democratic institutions in Slovenia. In a recent interview, the President of the Republic described such opinions as too radical. The second exception is tax policy. In developed democracies, this is one of the main parameters for positioning within the democratic political space, but here some people experience the mere mention of higher taxes as hate speech and national treason. Some time ago, the flower of Slovenian entrepreneurs was one of the few endangered groups in Slovenia that, fearing the verbal violence of bloodthirsty fiscal extremists who dared to propose a higher tax on capital gains, found refuge in the warm bosom of the president’s palace.

Since it has become customary not to assess and classify politicians according to their political content, still less according to their attitude to constitutionally protected democratic values, many cannot resist the temptation to throw everyone into the same basket. “They’re-all-the-same-ism” is another symptom of our poor understanding of pluralist democracy. The lack of critical, value-based assessment of political discourse and actions, and attempts to seek national consensus in an ethical vacuum at the arithmetic midpoint—where there will be no more Poldes and Non-Poldes, but we will all be Half-Poldes—of course lead nowhere, least of all forward.

The story of tragic Slovenian division is a myth that serves to maintain the status quo. It is fed by a whole garbage truck of indecency, manipulation and lies dumped daily into the Slovenian public space for this purpose. We Slovenians are not divided; we are idiots. We longed for democracy for so long and fought for it, and now we behave as if we don’t know what to do with it. Our problem is not that we disagree but that we don’t know how to disagree. Pluralism not only allows but needs a diversity of opinion. It also needs political culture, of which there is tragically little in Slovenia, and less and less.

In my writing I avoid commenting on day-to-day politics, since I shape my publicly expressed opinions according to my attitude to shared, constitutional and European democratic values, not according to my personal views of this or that party or politician. This time I almost made an exception. I admit that Polde is not an entirely fictional character. And yet the fact that we cannot talk about the basics of how pluralist democracy works in Slovenia without dealing mainly with the role and actions of one individual is just another indicator of the state we are in. Above all, my writing is critical not only of Polde but also of those who build their political careers solely on not being him. The sad but indisputable fact is that in Slovenia we have problems with pluralist democracy not only because of a lack of experience but above all because, after thirty years, we still do not understand that its essence is not squabbling between egos but a democratic contest of programs and ideas.