STA, 19 January 2022 - MP Violeta Tomić resigned on Wednesday from the opposition Left party. It is not yet clear whether she will join another party or deputy group.
Tomić, a second-term MP and one of the most outspoken members of the party, recently confirmed for the daily Večer that she will not contest the upcoming general election on the slate of the Left.
She said she had been offered the opportunity to run in Maribor, but turned it down because she has been living in Ljubljana for more than 40 years.
The party's executive committee told the STA it decided not to field Tomić in the Ljubljana-Center district, the Left's heartland, whereupon she declined an offer to run in another district.
"We reached this decision due to a partial loss of trust recently and some disagreements on substance," it said, adding that they "came to the mutual agreement that continued cooperation was no longer possible."
Tomić told the STA the Left was "far from the party we built at the beginning", noting that intergenerational differences regarding the party's conduct and thinking had gone "beyond the limit of my tolerance".
Tomić is the third MP to quit the Left in this parliament. MP Željko Cigler defected to the Social Democrats (SD) last week, following in the footsteps of MP Franc Trček, who joined the SD in March 2020.
The defections shrink the Left deputy group to six MPs.
