Slovenia is a Central European nation located between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia with a population of around 2 million people. The economy of Slovenia is largely dependent on manufacturing, services, agriculture and tourism, with its GDP per capita estimated at US$25,000 in 2017. In terms of foreign relations, Slovenia has strong ties to other countries in the region as well as other countries around the world. It is also a member of the United Nations, European Union (EU) and NATO. In terms of politics, Slovenia has a parliamentary republic which includes two major parties: Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and Marjan Šarec List (LMŠ). The Parliament consists of 90 members who are elected by popular vote every four years. In 2017, Miro Cerar was prime minister and his SMER-SD party held majority in parliamentary elections. See militarynous for Slovenia military and defense.
Yearbook 2017
Slovenia. In January, the Slovenian Parliament passed a law that allows the border with Croatia to be closed, in order to stop migrants from entering the country. Neighboring countries Hungary and Austria also have similar laws. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for frequently used acronyms and abbreviations related to as well as country profile of Slovenia.
According to Countryaah.com, the Slovenian men’s national basketball team became the European champion for the first time in September. When the team returned home from the final against Serbia in Istanbul, Turkey, they received tributes from tens of thousands of Ljubljanabor.
In November, Slovenian incumbent Borut Pahor won the second round of the presidential election. 54-year-old Pahor won with 53% of the vote against challenger Marjan Šarec, who got 47%. Pahor has become known as the “king of Instagram” because of his frequent use of social media on the internet.
2004 Accession to the EU and NATO
In June 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US George W. Bush met for the first time. It happened in Slovenia in the former residence of President Tito. The election of Slovenia was highly strategic as it was not a member of NATO, and at the same time did not share the border with any former Soviet republic. The main agenda items at the summit were the US missile shield and NATO enlargement. The meeting took place two weeks before Slovenia and Croatia could celebrate the 10th anniversary of their secession from Yugoslavia.
The winner of the October general election was the Liberal Democrats, whose president, Janez Drnovsek, became prime minister. In December 2002, Drnovsek won the second round of the presidential election with 56% of the vote, becoming president. He was replaced at the Prime Minister post by Anton Rop. The center-left government coalition has 2/3 of the parliament behind it, and in 2002 negotiated both accession in the EU and in NATO. In a subsequent referendum in March 2003, 90% of Slovenians said yes to EU accession and 66% said yes to NATO. NATO accession took place formally on 1 April 2004 and accession to the EU on 1 May 2004.
Slovenia was the only country where the issue of NATO accession was put to a referendum, and at the same time it was strongly opposed to the US attack war on Iraq. 80% of the Slovenes were against the war. The murder of the Serbian political leader, Zoran Djindjic, showed how fragile the security situation in the Balkans can be, and it probably contributed to the relatively large majority joining NATO.
A constitutional court ordered in February 2004 that 18,000 Croats, Bosnians and Serbs should have restored their residence permit and other civil rights. Following Slovenia’s separation from Yugoslavia in 1992 and independence, the 18,000 had almost been deleted from public records, had been fired from their jobs, left without medical or social assistance rights, and had been without citizenship. This was now restored.
The border between the two parts, completely artificial, from the Italian border (southern slopes of the Julian Alps) to Slovenia of the Ziri pass, ran eastwards, staying at 15 ÷ 20 km. from the Sava valley, while to the east and south the border remained in general lines that of the Drau banat. Three districts of the Drava banat had passed entirely to Italy (Kočevje, Novo Mesto and Černomelj), while of the other four, divided with Germany, Longatico had lost only a small portion of territory, Ljubljana had been aggregated to Italy for the three quarters, Krško almost half and Litija a third. It was therefore necessary to create more homogeneous units, dividing the new province into 5 districts: Longatico (sq. Km. 560), Kočevje (sq. Km. 1064) and Čeernomelj (sq. Km. 664), which remained almost unchanged, while the district of Ljubljana (decreased by the part passed to Germany) was integrated with the southern portion of the district of Litija (sq. km. 964), and that of Novo Mesto with a portion of that of Krško (sq. km. 1288). The province was further divided into 95 municipalities. Its territory was mainly made up of hills and karst shelves with an uncertain surface hydrography, alternating with valley bottoms, and constituted an eminently wooded and agricultural region. Although it became an Italian province, a special arrangement was envisaged for Ljubljana, which recognized the Slovenian character of the populations. The powers were not exercised in it by a prefect, but by a high commissioner (based in Ljubljana, pop. 79,000), assisted by a council, appointed according to corporate principles, by the producing and working class of the Slovenian population. Other regulations concerned military service, which was not compulsory, and the teaching of Slovenian, which was taught in all elementary schools. It was also provided that the official documents be drawn up in Italian and Slovenian.
The Germans immediately showed that they wanted to proceed with a radical Germanization of the area assigned to them, resuming the work they had already done in the past and which had undergone a stop, indeed a regression, in the last days of the Habsburg Empire and after the collapse of it. Heading to the centers of Marburg, Pettau, Cilli and Assling, where they had their propaganda centers of the so-called Kulturbund, formed the two provinces of southern Styria (under the Gauleiter Siegfried Ueberreiter) and southern Carinthia (Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer, later tried and executed by Tito in the summer of 1947). In the area annexed to Italy, the first high commissioner was Emilio Grazioli, former federal secretary of Trieste; many Slovenes from the German area flocked to it, attracted by the relative linguistic and administrative autonomy granted. Nonetheless, public opinion was remarkably bewildered; the people, Catholic and linked to the traditional popular party of Msgr. Korošec, followed the directives of the bishop of Ljubljana Rozman (saved after the collapse at the bishop of Klagenfurt), who adapted to collaborate with the fascist authorities. By its influence, belogard. In the German part the gen. Yugoslav Rupnik (tried and executed by Tito in 1947), created the so-called domobranci militia in collaboration with the Germans.