Slovenia’s prime minister resigns, calls for snap poll

LJUBLJANA: Slovenian Prime Minister Marjan Sarec announced on Monday he would step down and called for fresh elections, following weeks of rising tensions within his minority coalition government.

"With these members of parliament and this coalition I cannot fulfil the people´s expectations," he told journalists. "The most honest thing we could do now would be early elections... to ask people whether they trust me and they want me to continue to work," added Sarec, who became prime minister in September 2018 following a previous snap election.

Sarec, 42, is Slovenia´s youngest ever prime minister and was previously best known as a comedian and political satirist before he launched himself as an anti-establishment politician. His resignation came almost at the same time as Finance Minister Andrej Bertoncelj also announced he would quit in a row over healthcare funding. Since taking office, Sarec´s centre-left government has been buffeted by a string of scandals and disputes, leaving it unable to pass key legislation.

Bertoncelj was the latest of six high-profile ministers to resign from the current government. In December, the coalition barely managed to appoint a new cohesion minister after the populist Slovenian National Party agreed to abstain from the vote. In the 2018 poll, Sarec stressed his pro-European credentials and compared his politics to those of centrist French President Emmanuel Macron.