President Danilo Tuerk of Slovenia faced an impeachment vote in parliament yesterday. The motion to dismiss the president (on the basis of Art. 109 of the 1991 Constitution) was tabled on 28 January by the opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and the Slovenian People’s Party (SLS). Slovenia Times reports that the vote against the president yesterday evening was 32-52.

A report by the Slovenian Press Agency gives some background. Apparently the two opposition parties were annoyed that the president decorated Tomaz Ertl, a former chief of the communist secret police, whom they accused of having violated human rights. Indeed, the opposition accused the president of breaking no fewer than 34 articles of the constitution in so doing. In his defense, President Tuerk is reported as saying that he was not decorating Ertl’s whole life, but only “his efforts as the head of a police operation that prevented a rally by Serb nationalists in Ljubljana in 1989”.

Currently, the government is led by the Social Democrats (SD) who are in coalition with Zares and Liberal Democracy (LDS), as well as the pensioners’ party DeSus. The government has a small majority in parliament.

President Tuerk was elected in June 2007. He stood as an independent (and for cohabitation or non-cohabitation purposes I record him as such), but he was clearly the candidate of the left and won the election against another independent candidate, but one who was equally clearly supported by the right-wing SDS and SLS.

In a separate development, the leader of DeSus, Karl Erjavec ,was obliged to resign his position as Minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning on 26 January as the result of issues relating to alleged financial mismanagement. He was replaced by another DeSus representative. So, the coalition remains intact.

It is tempting to think that the impeachment vote, which was tabled just after this resignation, was at least part of a general strategy to destabilise the government further and perhaps precipitate a change.