The interview with the left-leaning weekly follows the Marjan Šarec List emerging as a leading party in the latest public opinion poll by the newspaper Delo.

Šarec said he understood the result as an incentive, as an "indicator that we are on the right path, that we have set the right goals". He insists that he is ready and that he knows what he is going into.

The former actor and comedian, who was elected Kamnik mayor in 2010, believes that the current parliamentary parties were not thinking strategically by not endorsing him in the presidential campaign.

"It should have been in their interest that I am elected president. Then they would not have such problems with my party today," he assessed.

Šarec does not think about becoming prime minister as "this would be very cocky", but he added that every president of a party running in the general election was a candidate for prime minister in principle.

"If I didn't feel capable of performing this job, then I wouldn't have decided to be a candidate", he added.

He noted that his party was being wrongly compared to Positive Slovenia of Ljubljana Mayor Zoran Janković or the Modern Centre Party (SMC) of Prime Minister Miro Cerar, the parties that emerged just months before the elections to win most of the vote.

"The only goal of these parties is to win the elections. The goal of the Marjan Šarec List is to enter parliament," he explained.

Šarec advocates changing the election system and would like to see the preferential vote introduced, modelled after the European elections. This is not necessarily the only acceptable option.

He would also change the procedure of government confirmation in parliament. "I see no sense in MPs first confirming the prime-minister designate, and only then his or her team. Both could be done in one go."

If the prime-minister designate is responsible for the formation of the government, he or she should then have the option of dismissing a minister, he added.

Šarec would re-introduce a financial supervision body which would perform the tasks of the former Public Accounting Service (SDK), which operated in 1959-1994.

"Companies started defaulting on their payments when they abolished the SDK. It was a financial police of sorts, which we don't have today, and everybody does as they please," he stressed.

He would also "bring order" in the healthcare system, identifying the "inefficient spending of money" as the main problem.

Šarec takes the fight against climate change seriously, and supports an expansion of the Slovenia-Croatia owned Krško nuclear power plant (NEK).

As a citizen, he is bothered by the overblown bureaucracy, and he is tired of "having to explain to people all the time why something cannot be done."

Asked who constituted the core of his party, which numbers some 300 people, Šarec said that these were people who could be seen by his side during the presidential election campaign. "They are not known to the wider public."

His party will be open for cooperation to all, and will "only avoid people who are involved in any suspicious deals".