If Slovenians could choose, they would largely dismiss the proposals of minister of health Milojka Kolar Celarc, and the majority of Slovenian citizens believe that the government project Magna Steyr will join the line of “catastrophic failures” and bring more harm than good. Moreover, almost one fifth of respondents blame Cerar’s government for the ecological catastrophe at Kemis in Vrhnika.
The poll was carried out from 30 May to 2 June 2017, and the sample consisted of 606 participants (49.5% of which were women). It was a telephone poll conducted by the company for market research and opinion polls Parsifal SC, and its sampling framework included the telephone directory (70% from the mobile network, 30% from the stationary network). The poll measured the general opinion on current societal and socio-political topics – the healthcare reform, i.e. the change concerning primary and complementary health insurance, the government project Magna Steyr, and the accountability for the ecological disaster at Kemis in Vrhnika.
Political analyst Sebastjan Jeretič: “Minister of health Milojka Kolar Celarc is probably the most unfortunate choice by the prime minister, for in these three years she has clashed with almost all stakeholders in healthcare. Despite this, she enjoys Miro Cerar’s full support, which is very peculiar. Coalition partners are nervous as well since she has been preparing proposals without any dialogue throughout her entire term, and even they receive the final laws at the very last minute, losing their chance to voice any constructive criticism. For this reason, the ever harsher criticism from DeSUS and the SD party does not surprise me. The public can barely follow this sort of development and her reform proposals, for they are witnessing one lie after another. First she had claimed that 80% of people will be paying less, the number then changed to 70%, but by then the media had already uncovered the truth that the majority will in fact pay more. This is why I am not surprised about the rather large percent of those who bought into her populism and the even greater support for her proposal. Once the middle class realises that this reform will bring an annual loss between €500 to €1.000 for anyone with a decent salary without the benefit of better healthcare, the opposition will be much stiffer. Perhaps this will be the final straw to completely collapse SMC, for it is the middle class that tips the election scale into one direction or another.”
