Janez Janša

Ivan Janša (; born 17 September 1958), baptized and best known as Janez Janša (), is a Slovenian politician who served three times as a prime minister of Slovenia, a position he had held from 2004 to 2008, from 2012 to 2013, and from 2020 to 2022. Since 1993, Janša has led the Slovenian Democratic Party, which has emerged as the pre-eminent Slovenian conservative party. Janša lost his fourth bid for prime minister in April 2022, his party defeated by the Freedom Movement party.

Janša served as Minister of Defence from 1990 to 1994, a post he had also held during the Slovenian War of Independence. Janša served as prime minister from 2004 to 2008, and again became prime minister in 2012, following an early election in December 2011. On 27 February 2013, Janša's second government was ousted in a vote of non-confidence. In June 2013, Janša was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges. The ruling was confirmed by Slovenia's higher court in April 2014, but after the Constitutional Court of Slovenia ordered a retrial for procedural reasons, the case later expired. Despite his party winning a plurality of votes in the 2018 Slovenian parliamentary election, Janša was initially passed over as a prime minister candidate as most parties refused to join a Janša-led government because of Janša's extremist views. After spending years in opposition, Janša was selected as prime minister-designate in March 2020 following the resignation of prime minister Marjan Šarec. His third term as a prime minister ended on 13 May 2022.

A communist in his youth, Janša's political stance has drifted rightward during the course of his political career, from a liberal, pro-democracy dissident under communist rule, to a social democrat politician, and to a right-wing hardliner. Janša was described as a far-right leader by ''The Independent'' and by ''Foreign Policy'' in 2020. His style of politics has been compared to Donald Trump. He has been dubbed a "MAGA-style populist" by NPR, "the Slovenian Trump" by ''Der Spiegel'', and "mini-Trump" by Deutsche Welle. Following the 2020 United States presidential election, Janša declared Trump the winner, and proceeded to tweet a series of conspiracy theories about the election. Janša is a close ally of Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Youth and education

Janša was born to a Roman Catholic working-class family of Grosuplje. He was called ''Janez'' (a version of the name ''Ivan''; both are ''John'' in English) since childhood. His father was a member of the Slovene Home Guard from Dobrova near Ljubljana who had escaped communist retaliation due to his young age.

Janša graduated from the Faculty of Sociology, Political Science, and Journalism of the University of Ljubljana with a degree in Defence Studies in 1982, and became employed in the Defence Secretariate of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

In 1975, aged 17, Janša joined the League of Communists, and became one of the leaders of its youth wing. He became president of the Committee for Basic People's Defence and Social Self-Protection of the (ZSMS). Janša was expelled from the party in 1983 after breaking with Yugoslav military orthodoxy by criticizing the system of people's self-defense from a radical left perspective. Janša appealed his ouster, but his appeal was denied. Despite the ejection, Janša touted his work in the party in a resume while applying for a job as newspaper editor in 1985.

Dissident

In 1983, Janša wrote the first of his dissident articles about the nature of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). In the late 1980s, as Slovenia was introducing democratic reforms and gradually lifting restrictions on freedom of speech, Janša wrote several articles criticising the Yugoslav People's Army in ''Mladina'' magazine (published by the League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia). As a result, his re-election as president of the Committee was blocked in 1984, and in 1985 his passport was withdrawn. During this period, Janša and his associates were held under closer watch by the Yugoslav secret police. Janša was also barred from gaining employment in any state institution or state-owned company. Between 1985 and 1986, he made over 250 job applications without success despite meeting all qualifications. He was also unable to publish articles. During this period he earned his living writing computer programs and as a chance mountaineering guide.

Liberalization in the succeeding years allowed him to get work as secretary of the Journal for the Criticism of Science in 1986, and, a year later, to again begin publishing in Mladina. His Mladina articles consisted of critical opinion columns and articles on the topic of democracy and national sovereignty.

In the mid-1980s, Janša was employed in the Slovenian software company ''Mikrohit''; in the years 1986 and 1987, Janša founded, together with his friend Igor Omerza (later high-ranking politician of the Slovenian Democratic Union and the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia), his own software company ''Mikro Ada''.

He became involved in the pacifist movement, and emerged as an important activist in the network of civil society organizations in Slovenia. By the mid-1980s, he was one of the most prominent activist of the Slovenian pacifist movement. Janša also became active in the nascent environmental movement.

Rapprochement with the Socialist Youth movement

In 1987, Janša was approached by the family of the late politician Stane Kavčič, who had been the most important exponent of the reformist fraction in the Slovenian Communist Party in the late 1960s, and prime minister of Slovenia between 1967 and 1972; he was asked to edit the manuscript of Kavčič's diaries. Janša edited the volume together with Igor Bavčar.Božo Repe and Jože Prinčič, Pred časom: portret Staneta Kavčiča (Ljubljana: Modrijan 2009), 49 The publication of the book was part of the political project of Niko Kavčič, former banker and prominent member of the reformist wing of the Communist Party, to establish a new Slovenian left wing political formation that would challenge the hardliners within the Communist Party.

In the spring of 1988, Janša ran for president of the , a semi-independent youth organization of the Communist Party, which had been open, since 1986, also to non-party members. In his program, Janša proposed that the organization become independent of the Communist Party and transform itself into an association of all youth and civic associations; he also proposed that it rename itself the "League of Youth Organizations and Movements", and that it assume the role of the main civil society

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