🇸🇮🇮🇱 Janez Janša is paying his debts?

Slovenia's new PM has announced his government will freeze recognition of Palestine and relocate the country's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — making Slovenia the first EU state to do so, joining a club that otherwise consists of the US, Kosovo, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Papua New Guinea.

Context matters here. Slovenia's previous government, under Robert Golob, had been one of the most vocal Palestine-supporting voices in the EU — recognizing Palestinian statehood in 2024, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, banning Netanyahu and far-right ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich from entry, and seeing its public broadcaster boycott Eurovision over Gaza.

Janša spent the run-up to this year's election on the receiving end of a different kind of attention. Black Cube — an Israeli private intelligence firm founded by former Mossad and IDF officers, known for running covert dirty-tricks campaigns against journalists, NGOs, and political targets on behalf of paying clients — sent officials to Slovenia in December 2025, where they met with SDS politicians. Whatever real corruption issues existed within Golob's government, what followed wasn't accountability — it was an anonymous website pushing allegations, fake LinkedIn profiles, and operatives running false identities to stage meetings abroad, engineered to chip away at trust in a government that was still polling ahead going into a tight race.

Janša has admitted meeting the Black Cube official but denies involvement in the campaign itself.

Golob actually won the election — narrowly, 29 seats to SDS's 28 — but couldn't put together a coalition. The deadlock handed the initiative to SDS, and Janša became PM for a fourth time by assembling a right-wing bloc instead. Before that coalition was even finalized, Janša made one thing non-negotiable: freezing Palestine recognition and moving the embassy to Jerusalem. In his own words, "We raised this as a condition for our participation in the coalition negotiations, and everyone agreed." Within an hour of being sworn in, the Palestinian flag came down from the government building. The rest is just him following through on the deal.

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