By Fatos Bytyci and Daria Sito-Sucic
LJUBLJANA, March 22 (Reuters) – Slovenia’s ruling Freedom Movement (GS) of incumbent Prime Minister Robert Golob was on track to win a parliamentary election on Sunday, but it will need to find more coalition partners to form a government after seeing its projected seat count drop, an exit poll showed.
GS won 29.9% of the votes or 30 seats in the 90-seat parliament, compared with 41 in the previous election, an exit poll published by public broadcaster TV Slovenia and commercial Pop TV television showed.
The opposition Slovenian Democratic Party of populist leader Janez Jansa is set to come second with 27 seats in parliament, a poll by Mediana polling agency showed.
“If someone wants a government like the one we’ve had so far, then they are probably satisfied with what these parallel results indicate,” Jansa said after the exit polls were published.
“Whoever wants change will likely have to wait for the final results, just as we will, and then we will analyse the situation. But we have done everything that was within our power,” he said.
The election campaign, which observers described as dirty from the start, heated up this month when covert videos were published on an anonymous website purportedly exposing government corruption.
A report this week alleged that Jansa met with officials from Israeli private spy firm Black Cube, which LinkedIn alleged in 2023 was behind a hidden camera campaign that targeted activists and journalists in the lead-up to Hungary’s 2022 vote.
“No politeness, some lies that came out on one side or the other, so I didn’t feel they were telling us, the voters, the story that we could follow,” Ifigenija Simonovic, a 73-year-old writer, said after voting in Ljubljana.
“So to decide today, it really wasn’t easy.”
(Reporting by Branko Filipovic, Fatos Bytyci, Gasper Lubej and Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Alexander Smith and Hugh Lawson)
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