Slovenia to Hold Early Election

Slovenia will hold an early general election on June 3, President Borut Pahor announced on Saturday, a month after center-left Prime Minister Miro Cerar resigned over a legal obstacle to a government investment project.

“On this day I dismiss the parliament and determine June 3 as the date of early parliamentary election,” Pahor told a news conference, Reuters reported.

The decision to hold the election a week or two earlier than planned comes after the Supreme Court ordered a second referendum on whether the government should proceed with its 1-billion-euro railway project, a move that had led to Cerar’s resignation.

Some 1.7 million people are eligible to vote. They will choose candidates from more than 20 political parties, with a 4% minimum vote threshold for a party to enter the 90-seat parliament.

The center-left List of Marjan Sarec (LMS), running for the first time and led by Sarec, the mayor of the city of Kamnik, has been leading opinion polls over the past months. Analysts say, however, that the result is hard to predict.

They claim the opposition center-right Slovenian Democratic Party and a junior partner in the government coalition, the Social Democrats, both trailing closely behind the LMS in polls, are also in a position that could lead to election victory.