January 18 (SeeNews) - Slovenia's Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia (DeSUS) and the Constitutional Arch Coalition (KUL) filed a motion of no confidence against the government led by the populist conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) on January 15, DeSUS said.
The motion was signed by 42 members of the 90-seat parliament, who also proposed the leader of DeSUS Karl Erjavec as new prime minister, the party said in a statement late on Friday.
The reason for the motion is that Slovenian citizens do not trust prime minister Janez Jansa, DeSUS said.
"Since taking office in March 2020, Jansa has systematically violated fundamental principles of the constitutional order such as the separation of powers, respect for independent institutions and freedom of the media; his reckless actions have endangered Slovenia's reputation in the European Union and its foreign policy position in the international community; the government under his leadership did not know how to deal effectively with the Covid-19 epidemic and brought Slovenia to the top of the world ranking of deaths per million inhabitants," DeSUS said in the statement.
For his part, Janza described in a Twitter post the motion as "a pathetic outpour of ideological hatred towards dissenters, which would be comical if we were not in the middle of a severe wave of epidemics."
The KUL bloc, formed in October, is comprised of centre-left opposition parties List of Marjan Sarec, Social Democrats and Alenka Bratusek Party, as well as the socialist Left party. The bloc has 39 seats in Parliament, while DeSUS, which left the government coalition in December, has four.
Slovenia will take over the six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1.