STA, 6 April 2018 - The plenary session at which the National Assembly was supposed to decide today on a proposal to recognise Palestine as an independent state has been cancelled on procedural grounds.
Five of the 25 MPs backing up the demand for the session have withdrawn their signatures, which means the required support by a quarter of MPs needed to call the session is no longer available.
The session had been demanded by the opposition Left in order to discuss its initiative to recognise Palestine.
The latest manoeuvre comes after the Foreign Policy Committee failed to take a position on Palestine's recognition for a third time in as many days due to a lack of quorum.
The position would have been necessary for the plenary to decide on the matter.
The proposal to recognise Palestine has been going back and forth between MPs and the government ever since being submitted for the first time by the Left in 2014.
Despite being in favour of the recognition in principle, the government has failed to take a position on the matter before being relegated to the caretaker role with PM Miro Cerar's resignation last month.
On the proposal of chair Jožef Horvat, the committee adopted a position on Wednesday that it could not vote on the recognition of Palestine because it had not obtained the government position on the matter.
However, after Horvat refused to call another session to discuss the proposal again, the session was called by Speaker Milan Brglez but failed to move to a vote due to a lack of quorum.
In a new twist Horvat told reporters today that he had received death threats over his allegedly obstructing the process of Palestine recognition.
The threats were contained in an anonymous e-mail sent to the server of his New Slovenia (NSi) party. He referred the e-mail to police, who assessed the threats as serious.
Horvat refused to take the blame for the situation, arguing it was not him who obstructed Palestine's recognition as the committee had asked for the government position as early as November 2014.
