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system went on for several years and even led to a split in the LDS prior to the 2000
parliamentary elections.
Since independence and the fall of Communism, keenly felt public and party
controversy had been caused by issues relating to the recent past, Yugoslav Communism and
events in Slovenia following the Second World War. The critics of the Yugoslav and Slovene
Communist regime included many daring for the first time, in the democratic atmosphere that
followed 1990, to talk openly of their political views and their experiences of the tyranny of
the Communist regime. The more militant opponents of the post-war regime, who considered
Communism to be a criminal system – with the Yugoslav Communist regime no exception in
this respect – called on the new Slovene authorities to deal more decisively with the
Communist past. For them, changing accepted views of the Second World War, the Partisan
resistance and collaboration was an essential part of dealing with the past. The most
passionate advocates of revising what they called ‘Communist history’ denied that the
Slovene anti-occupation movement in the years 1941–1945 had any significance whatsoever.
They claimed it was merely a Communist movement and maintained that members of the
Slovene anti-Partisan forces and their political leaders were not collaborators but anti-
Communist fighters. This unleashed angry public disputes, which were further fuelled by the
discovery of mass graves containing the victims of the post-war massacre of the Home Guard
(Domobranci)) and opponents of Communism. However, the government and the political
parties did nothing to speed up the identification of the victims or to provide a more dignified
burial. The LDS, the ZL and some of the smaller parties largely rejected the general criticisms
of Yugoslav Communism and the Partisan movement during the Second World War. Public
opinion was also generally opposed to a radical overhaul and revision of interpretations of the
recent past.
Ahead of the 1997 presidential election, the SDS and the SKD (Christian Democrats)
proposed to the National Assembly a lustration law and a declaration condemning the
Communist regime, but they did not gain sufficient support. Milan Kučan was re-elected as
president without any difficulty (winning 55.6% of the vote). In the second half of the 1990s,
opinion polls began to show that the primarily negative view of Communist Yugoslavia that
had prevailed during the early post-independence years was gradually changing, as more and
more of those polled said that they had relatively good memories of it. The attitude of certain
parties and a considerable portion of the population towards their Serbian, Croatian and
Albanian-speaking fellow citizens, who had moved to Slovenia during the time of Yugoslavia,
however, remained less tolerant. Most of them did succeed in acquiring Slovene citizenship in
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the early 1990s with
little difficulty, but a little over 18,300 of them, who failed to provide the
necessary documents before the legal deadline, were erased from the register of permanent
citizens by the authorities without notice, with all rights as citizens rescinded. In 1999, the
Constitutional Court found that the ‘erasure’ had been illegal, but the political parties could
still not agree about on how to legally resolve the status of the ‘Erased’. In the following years
the majority of them managed to acquire Slovene citizenship, while political parties continued
to argue about how to resolve the issues of those remaining, and compensation for the Erased
for the time their rights were denied, but without success.
In 2000, the SLS left the governing coalition, due to disagreements with the LDS, and
teamed up
with the Christian Democrats, who had steadily lost voters throughout the 1990s
due to their lack of clearly defined policies. This left the governing coalition without a
majority in the National Assembly and a new government was formed by the SDS and the
joint SLS+SKD (Christian Democrats and Slovene People’s Party). Christian Democrat
Andrej Bajuk became prime minister, with the greatest influence on his policies coming from
the SDS, led by Janez Janša. Bajuk’s government had less than six months at its disposal, with
new parliamentary elections scheduled for the middle of October, but it still attempted to
introduce extensive changes, which were accompanied by the replacement of civil servants
and directors of state-controlled companies, and tackled areas as sensitive as education, tax
collection and state finances. However, these measures did not increase the popularity of the
governing parties and at the parliamentary elections, on 15 October 2000, the LDS again won
the largest share of the vote (36.3%). The new government was again formed by Janez
Drnovšek, and it included the LDS, the ZL, the joint SLS+SKD, and DeSUS. Drnovšek led
the party until 2002, when he was elected President of Slovenia. He was succeeded as prime
minister by the finance minister, Anton Rop, who also became the new president of the LDS.
Even after 2000, the overriding focus of Slovene politics was to meet the economic,
political and other criteria for European Union entry as quickly as possible. The government
paid close attention to the economic situation, which was – despite somewhat slower
economic growth in 2002/2003 – relatively good. For a short period after 2000, the LDS
leadership went along with the ideas of liberal advocates of more rapid privatisation and the
sale of state assets. The government’s willingness to sell off state holdings in some of the
larger companies and banks (especially the largest bank – Nova Ljubljanska Banka) to
foreigners triggered enormous opposition from the public, the opposition and experts, who
argued that selling successful companies and banks was pointless and contrary to national
interests. The LDS then settled on a more cautious policy of gradually opening up to foreign