POLITICAL CHANGES IN SLOVENIA SINCE 1989
This research paper discusses the political transformation in Slovenia since the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in 1991. Slovenia rapidly achieved independence and established a multiparty democracy. It was able to do so largely because of its economic strength and resources, its relative ethnic homogeneity and its distance from the major wars that have devastated the former Yugoslavia. Free and fair elections have been held. Its politics since the Cold War have been dominated by a left-of-center coalition of social democratic parties, but, recently, its coalition government has included center-right and rightist parties, following the resurgence of rightist sentiment in the mid-1990s. Although Slovenia has had perhaps the most stable government in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, its progress toward an enduring democracy has been marred by corruption, crime and the rise of demagoguery on the right and of xenophobic nationalism and ethnic chauvinism toward minorities, especially refugees from the Serbo-Bosnian War.
The Republic of Slovenia is a small country located in the mountainous extreme northeastern corner of the former Yugoslavia. It borders on Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Italy. It has a population of about two million, 87 percent of which in 1995 were Slovenians (South Slavs). Minorities include Croats (2.8 percent), Serbs (2.4 percent) and small pockets of Albanians and other Muslims, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Hungarians and Italians (Slovenia 2930). Slovenia is predominantly Roman Catholic. Although Slovenians have had a distinct sense of ethnic identity since Napoleonic times, the region before 1989 was ruled for more than 20 centuries by Franks, Romans, Hungarians, France, Austria-Hungary (until 1918), the Serb-dominated Royal Yugoslav dictatorship (1918-1941), Germany and Italy during World War II, and Josef Tito's communist Yugoslavia...