Citizens take to the streets against corruption

Published on 4 December 2012 at 15:54

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The demonstrations are “coming in waves,” reports daily Večer. The protests against corruption and the austerity measures brought in by the conservative government of Janez Janša, which dominated the recent presidential election campaign, started after Social Democrat Borut Pahor won that election. Janša himself, as well as the leader of the opposition and mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, are under investigation for corruption. On December 3 in Maribor, 10,000 people took to the streets to demand the resignation of the city's mayor, Franc Kangler. The daily Delo notes

The anger and social discontent came to the boil after Kangler, who is suspected of corruption and cronyism, was elected to the Senate. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. The citizens are rebelling against the accumulated problems of transition, doubtful privatisations, corruption, breaches of the rule of law and the arbitrariness of the political class. The government has been unable to take intelligent decisions to stop the demonstrations and restore hope, and to persuade people that it is at the polling booths and not in the street where problems are to be confronted.

The Dnevnik newspaper writes that –

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It is not the street that makes the laws, as those who want to discredit the protesters claim, but the people who have decided to take politics into their own hands, not only in Maribor, but throughout the whole country – Ljubljana, Celje, Koper, Kranj, Novo Mesto or Trbovlje – to show solidarity with Maribor.

“Slovenia, cited for 20 years as a successful example of a country in transition, is being shaken by a deep crisis,” writes Jutarnji Lisit. For the Croatian daily –

The country, whose GDP was one of the highest among the transition countries and which joined the EU in 2004 and introduced the euro only three years later, is now following in the footsteps of Greece and Portugal. This is a consequence of reforms left undone, and of credits that the banks, whose majority shareholder is the state, dispense according to agreed political criteria, not economic criteria. Today banks are piling up debts, and getting a loan has become about as easy as winning the lottery.

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