Slovenia Votes in Election Marked by Anti-Romany Rhetoric From Both Sides

Economists who study ethnic exclusion have long understood that marginalised populations serve a particular function in electoral competition. Karen Stenner, in her 2005 work 'The Authoritarian Dynamic,' describes how vulnerable minorities become lightning rods for activating latent authoritarian dispositions in the broader electorate. This pattern crosses ideological boundaries, and parties of the left and right find common ground when a sufficiently vulnerable minority can absorb blame for structural failures.

Slovenia's parliamentary election, taking place this Sunday, is a case study in how this pattern operates within a European Union member state.

The country's approximately 12,000 Roma citizens have become the contested terrain of the campaign, with both major candidates seeking to outbid the other on measures targeting this population. The incumbent centre-left prime minister passed legislation enabling warrantless police raids on Romany settlements, while his right-wing challenger has campaigned on expanding these measures still further.

'We Roma are facing two evils here in the election,' Zvonko Golobič, who leads the Association for the Development of the Roma Community in the southeastern town of Črnomelj, told reporters. 'So the question is: who is less evil?'

The framing tells an observer something important about how Roma communities perceive this election: they are not debating which candidate offers the better policy, but rather calculating degrees of harm.

The political context

Prime Minister Robert Golob leads the centre-left Freedom Movement party, which came to power in 2022 on a platform of democratic restoration following the contentious tenure of his opponent. That opponent, Janez Janša, has served three terms as prime minister and maintains close ties to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose government has systematically eroded Roma protections since 2010.

Current polling suggests Janša's Slovenian Democratic Party holds a narrow lead, though neither party appears positioned to command a majority in the 90-seat parliament. Post-election coalition negotiations will determine the government's composition.

The campaign has addressed conventional issues: healthcare access, corruption, economic management. But the treatment of the Roma community has emerged as a persistent undercurrent, surfacing in debates and campaign materials with notable frequency.

The legislative shift

The turning point came in November 2025, when Golob's government passed legislation that civil liberties organisations have described as creating de facto 'security zones' within Romany communities. The law, named after Aleš Šutar, a man killed in an altercation linked to members of the Romany community, grants police authority to enter homes in designated 'high-risk' areas without prior judicial authorisation.

Golob has maintained that the legislation targets criminal behaviour rather than ethnic identity. 'These measures are not aimed at any particular ethnic group but against crime itself,' the prime minister stated.

This claim warrants closer examination, because the European Roma Rights Centre, in its 2023 assessment of Slovenian policy (page 17), documented that Roma settlements constitute the overwhelming majority of areas that would qualify for 'high-risk' designation under the law's criteria, creating a near-total geographic correlation between enforcement zones and Romany communities.

Amnesty International's response to the legislation was direct: 'While not explicitly aimed at the Roma population, the vitriolic rhetoric used by the government to justify these measures raises serious fears that they would be deployed arbitrarily and discriminatorily against the Roma population.'

The opposition's position

Janša's campaign proposes intensification rather than any alternative vision. The three-time former prime minister has campaigned on expanding the scope of 'high-risk' designations and introducing harsher sentencing provisions for Roma defendants, while also pledging to reduce funding for civil society organisations. This last measure would directly affect the Romany advocacy groups that document abuses and organise community responses.

The approach mirrors patterns observable elsewhere in the region. Hungary's Orbán government, with which Janša has close ties, has deployed similar tactics. A 2022 study published in the Journal of European Social Policy found that Hungarian Roma experienced a 34 per cent decline in access to social housing between 2012 and 2020, coinciding with policy changes that nominally applied to all citizens but disproportionately affected Roma settlements.

Janša's previous term in office, from 2020 to 2022, was characterised by sustained pressure on independent media and hostile rhetoric toward migrants. His closeness to Orbán suggests shared convictions on minority policy.

The underlying conditions

The vulnerability of Roma populations to political scapegoating correlates directly with their material conditions, and understanding the political calculus requires examining the relevant data.

Amnesty International's 2020 report on Slovenia documented that Roma life expectancy was 22 years lower than the general population. Infant mortality among Roma was more than four times the national average. Multiple communities lacked access to clean drinking water, electricity, and sanitation infrastructure. The European Commission's 2019 Roma integration assessment ranked Slovenia in the bottom third of EU member states on education and employment indicators for Roma populations.

These figures describe conditions as of 2020, and subsequent data suggests they have not materially improved since then. A European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey released in 2024 found that 78 per cent of Slovenian Roma reported experiencing discrimination in the previous twelve months, compared to an EU-wide average of 41 per cent for Roma populations.

The mechanism is self-reinforcing in a manner that development economists have documented across multiple contexts. Infrastructure deficits constrain economic participation, which generates dependency on state transfers, which in turn creates resentment among majority populations. Political entrepreneurs then convert this resentment into electoral support by promising to reduce transfers or increase enforcement, though neither approach addresses the underlying infrastructure deficit that drives the cycle.

What distinguishes this particular campaign is the absence of any competing policy vision, with neither major candidate proposing investment in Roma communities through housing, education, employment programmes, or basic services. The entire debate concerns the intensity and scope of enforcement measures, leaving the underlying conditions unaddressed.

The timing

Haris Tahirović, president of an umbrella organisation representing Romany communities across Slovenia, observed that Golob introduced the Šutar Law in the months preceding the election.

'He used it to scapegoat Roma because he recognised Roma as the easiest target to attack to save his place as prime minister,' Tahirović stated.

The political arithmetic supports this interpretation: Slovenia's population is approximately 2.1 million, while the Roma population is approximately 12,000, representing 0.57 per cent of the total. Even with full participation and uniform voting patterns, the Roma vote cannot determine electoral outcomes, though the majority's attitudes toward Roma can shift results in competitive races.

This calculus shapes centre-left behaviour across Europe, as research by the European Network Against Racism, published in 2023, found that centre-left parties in seven EU member states had adopted restrictive positions on Roma policy during election periods, reversing previous commitments to integration programmes. The pattern suggests rational electoral positioning rather than genuine ideological shift, with parties adjusting their stance to capture votes that might otherwise flow to right-wing competitors.

Comparative context

Slovenia's situation is not exceptional within the European context, though it illustrates patterns present across the continent with unusual clarity due to the transparency with which both major parties have competed for anti-Roma votes.

The European Commission's 2024 progress report on Roma integration identified persistent gaps in every member country, with employment rates for Roma adults averaging 43 per cent across the EU compared to 73 per cent for non-Roma populations. Educational attainment shows similar disparities. The report noted (page 34) that 'political will on Roma inclusion has weakened in multiple member countries since 2020.'

Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, France, and Italy have each experienced election campaigns in the past decade where Roma populations featured prominently in negative political messaging, with outcomes that have varied in degree but followed a consistent pattern: marginalisation creates visible social problems, which provide material for political messaging, which in turn generates support for policies that intensify marginalisation further.

Robert Botteri, editor of the Slovenian magazine Mladina, characterised Sunday's vote as potentially 'the most important elections ever in Slovenia because they will decide if Slovenia remains a democratic welfare country or moves toward illiberal governance.'

For Roma communities, however, the distinction may be less meaningful than Botteri suggests, because the 2024 Fundamental Rights Agency data shows that discrimination rates for Roma vary only modestly between democratic welfare states and illiberal democracies: Sweden reports 29 per cent of Roma experiencing discrimination while Hungary reports 47 per cent. The gap exists, though neither figure suggests anything approaching full inclusion.

The stated demand

'We're not asking for anything other than to be an equal part of this society,' Tahirović said.

The request is modest in its formulation: equality before the law, access to services available to other citizens, freedom from arbitrary enforcement. These are entitlements that European human rights frameworks nominally guarantee to all residents.

Neither major party's platform offers a pathway to these outcomes, because the debate concerns enforcement mechanisms and their scope rather than the conditions that enforcement ostensibly addresses.

'At this moment Roma are really afraid of who will come to power, what the political options will be, and what will happen after the elections,' Tahirović added.

Polls close Sunday evening and results are expected overnight. For Slovenia's Roma population, the outcome will determine the degree and form of the pressures they face in the coming term, though it will not determine whether such pressures exist, as that question was answered before the first vote was cast.