Published: 20 December 2011
Region: Slovenia
By Maja Ladić for MDI
A controversial article that provoked numerous reactions was published on the SDS website on Friday, 9 December. This piece by Tomaž Majer talks about Janković as the “relative winner” and targeted the migrants among the 300,000 Slovenian citizens who voted for him. He said these “new citizens” spoke with foreign accents, dressed in sports clothes (tracksuits) and when they arrived to vote had the number they are supposed to vote for written on their hands. He also said there were groups of “observers” at polling stations constantly on the phone – and most of them speaking Serbian.
The author says that the electorate of “new citizens” is roughly 280,000 people. This is made up of 200,000 immigrants from other former Yugoslav republics when Slovenia became independent in 1991. He claims that due to the high fertility rate of this population by 2011 this number had increased to 220,000. Additionally during the Balkan wars at least 40,000 more people migrated to Slovenia and he said further 20,000 so called erased people were granted citizenship by the former Minister of the Interior.
Majer alleges that threats and bribes were used in the Janković campaign, with voters receiving phone calls or even visits in the last week before the elections. He claimed Janković and his team operated in a militaristic way, using electoral registers to mobilise tens of thousands voters who didn’t even know who the candidate in their constituency was or which political parties were on the ballot. “Vote for Zoki (Zoran Janković), his number is this and this, otherwise Janša will take away your citizenship”, were the supposed threats, claims Majer who concludes that because of the country’s generosity with citizenship, Slovenia will at its 20th anniversary get a Serbian and socialist tycoon as its Prime Minister.
The response to this extraordinary article was swift. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter it was instantly brought to the attention of the wider public. Twitter society in Slovenia is influential and contains a group of powerful opinion-makers and for two days, the hashtag sweatsuit (#trenirka) was the most common word in Slovenian social media.
Twitter society organised an event – a gathering where people expressed their outrage with the hatred expressed on the official website of SDS by wearing tracksuits (the typical outfit of “new citizens”, according to Majer).
A Facebook group “The day of the tracksuit – the day against intolerance”successfully reached out to a wider audience. The petition “We are not ‘new citizens’, we are Slovenian citizens!” is also spreading and receiving more and more support. A wide range of civil society organisations, academics, politicians, state authorities and individuals responded.
For example, the Slovene Information Commissioner used Twitter to express her disapproval of the text and announces she was filing a complaint against the author for hate speech. The Human Rights Ombudsman (HRO) also commented on the national TV and condemned the text on SDS website. The president of Slovenia also published a press release expressing concern.
This incident revealed the importance and value of social media in public debate, but also highlighted how it is a two-edged sword. It is an ideal platform for sharing news, opinions and ideas and it enables quick, instant reactions of the civil society, but the same platform also provides voice for intolerant and racist comment. Worryingly in the first five days after it appeared more than 4,000 people “liked” the controversial article. Numerous comments – most of them negative – have followed publication of articles prepared across practically all Slovenian media dealing with this issue.
Most Slovenian media reported positively about the reaction of the civil society – protesting with the tracksuits. Some expressed their support for such initiatives and encouraged their audience to join. A short search on the online edition of Delo, for example, the third most read daily newspaper in Slovenia and the leading quality newspaper, shows 34 items dealing with the xenophobic SDS article.
There are several interviews with experts on human rights, hate speech and nationalism that expose the negative and worrying nature of SDS discourse.
Delo journalists stood on the side of tolerance and equal rights as did many others in the Slovene press. Žurnal24 (the second most read, a free newspaper) and Dnevnik took a strong position and condemned Majer’s statement as well as SDS. The Journalist Association of Slovenia appealed to politicians not to “poison the overall atmosphere in the country” and condemned the article for its nationalistic discourse and elements of hate speech.
Public figures also took a stand. The Slovenian actor and broadcasting host, Jonas Žnidaršič, appeared in a tracksuit on national television the day before the protest gathering and the Deputy Ombudsman did the same on the day of the gathering, both of them sending a clear message to the public.
For its part the Slovenian Peace Institute believes the article was an attempt to demonstrate the results of the elections (and the origins of the winner) as anti-Slovenian and for his purpose the author creates a typical racist discourse targeting allegedly “non-Slovenian” citizens and even distorting data about some of them (only around 7,300 erased out of around 25,000, have Slovenian citizenship and the right to vote, not around 20,000 as the author claims).
Making a distinction between “new citizens” and “old citizens” is an attempt to dehumanise a particular group and encourages ethnic division, intolerance and hatred. In any democracy citizenship grants full equality and integration into the legal and political order and making crude distinctions between citizens is a violation of fundamental constitutional order. To accept such distinctions between citizens endorses logic which is a priori racist.
