Slovenia’s president urges talks on future government after tight election outcome

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia (AP) — Slovenia ‘s president on Monday urged the country’s political parties to start talks on forming a new government as soon as possible after a parliamentary election on the weekend in the European Union country ended with no clear winner and the main players practically tied.

Prime Minister Robert Golob’s liberal Freedom Movement won 29 seats in the 90-member assembly while the opposition right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party, or SDS, won 28, according to preliminary results of 99.85% of votes counted by the state election authorities.

The outcome means that no party has a clear majority of 46 seats and that a future government will depend on smaller parties that emerged as kingmakers following the vote. It was not immediately clear what shape potential future alliances might take.

“I urge them to sit down at the negotiating table as soon as possible,” President Natasa Pirc Musar said on X. She congratulated the pro-EU ruling Freedom Movement party, which had a lead of less than 1%, describing it as “the relative winner” of the election.

Sunday’s vote was seen as a key test of whether the EU member nation stays on its liberal course or sways toward the right. The undecided outcome also reflects deep divisions among Slovenia’s 1.7 million eligible voters.

Golob’s government has been a strong liberal voice in the 27-nation EU. SDS leader Janez Jansa is a populist-style politician and a close ally of nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His return to power would be a boost to Europe’s right-wing blocs.

Golob on Sunday evening thanked the voters on the relative victory, saying that “we have remained the leading party.” He predicted “tough weeks ahead” when he will meet with parliamentary parties to try to find common ground.

Jansa, an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump, said his party would not want to form a weak coalition government. He said a “balance of political powers … based on what we see now, will not provide much stability.”

The vote was held after a heated campaign that featured allegations of foreign interference and corruption, further whipping already heightened political tensions between the two opposed blocs.

Pensioner Rajko Campa, from the capital Ljubljana, said he was surprised by the election results and that he supported Jansa’s conservatives, arguing that it is healthy to change those in power every few years.

Slovenia routinely has switched between the right and left-leaning blocks since it broke away from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. The Alpine nation of 2 million people became a member of NATO and the EU in 2004.