April 26 (SeeNews) - Slovenia's green liberal Freedom Movement won an outright victory in Sunday's regular parliamentary elections, denying the aspirations of Janez Jansa for a fourth term as prime minister amid a high voter turnout, preliminary official results showed on Tuesday.
The Freedom Movement, established in May 2021 and led by Robert Golob, a former CEO of energy company Gen-I, won 34.5% of the vote, followed by Jansa's populist conservative Democratic Party (SDS) with 23.5%, the national electoral commission said after having processed 99.98% of the ballots.
The New Slovenia-Christian Democrats, a partner of SDS in the current coalition government, came third with 6.86%, while opposition Social Democrats (SD), the successor to the League of Communists of Slovenia, and eco-socialist party Levica (The Left) won 6.66% and 4.39%, respectively.
The social-liberal List of Marjan Sarec and the liberal Concretely party of economic development minister Zdravko Pocivalsek, another partner of SDS in the coalition government, remain just below the 4% threshold, the results showed.
According to Slovenian media reports, Golob said the Freedom Movement is already in talks for forming a coalition government with SD and The Left. Based on the preliminary results, the three parties would have a stable majority of 53 deputies in the 90-seat parliament.
"We would like to congratulate SD and Levica, who we believe will be our main interlocutors and collaborators in the coming days," the Freedom Movement said in a notice posted on its website shortly after the elections.
Voter turnout stood at 70.05%, the highest since the parliamentary elections in 2000, according to official data.
A total of 88 of the 90 lawmakers are elected under an open-list proportional representation system in eight 11-seat constituencies. Seats are allocated to the parties at the constituency level. The elected deputies are identified by ranking all of a party's candidates in a constituency by the percentage of votes they received in their district.
Two additional deputies are elected by the Italian and Hungarian ethnic minorities with voters ranking candidates listed on the ballot using points.