STA, 20 June 2019 - Dissatisfied with the cooperation with the Marjan Šarec minority government, the opposition Left (Levica) has started questioning the partnership. Coordinator Luka Mesec said on Thursday that the things had gotten stuck and that the party's council would decide in July whether to carry on with the cooperation.
"When it comes to cooperating with the government, we are dissatisfied," Mesec, who is also an MP, told the press, noting that the party had wanted to carry out before the summer at least four of the projects agreed on with the government.
"These are changes to the health services act with which we want to prevent privatisation of healthcare from the inside, indexation of the minimum hourly rate for students with the minimum wage, regulation of real estate agencies, and transfer of apartments from the Bank Assets Management Company (DUTB) to the national Housing Fund."
Mesec said that the Left had held a meeting with Prime Minister Marjan Šarec two weeks ago to express the wish that at least these projects were implemented before the summer, but "nothing has been happening in these fields."
He said that he will thus "put forward to bodies of the Left to debate the question of whether it makes sense to continue cooperating with the government of Marjan Šarec."
According to Mesec, the debate will be concluded at the party's council, which will take a decision on what to do next after the end of the July session.
The last straw for the Left was obviously the decision of Slovenian Sovereign Holding (SSH) to sell the country's last major state-owned bank, Abanka to US fund Apollo, on Wednesday.
The party said in its first response that the sale should have been prevented and that it exposed Slovenia to a development risk.
Mesec was critical today of the government's non-action regarding the sale. "The two remaining systemic banks in state ownership, Abanka and NLB, have been sold in recent months. The biggest problem is that in both cases, the government did not even try to stop the forced procedures."
Not even once did Marjan Šarec as the prime minister call on the government as the sole shareholder of the SSH to intervene in the sale procedures, which were forced by the European Commission."
According to Mesec, the Left sees the government leaning towards the right lately, which could be concluded from a draft income tax reform prepared by Finance Minister Andrej Bertoncelj.
"Despite agreeing ... that we will go for a just tax reform, we are actually again getting a tax reform which will relieve the best paid persons the most and create a huge hole in the budget," he said.
