A year ahead of a regular general election, Slovenia is facing an ideologically divisive campaign after the country's largest party collected enough signatures to call a referendum on a bill that would grant special pension allowances to deserving artists in place of pensions afforded by a 50-year-old law.

The bill, passed in January, details the conditions and terms under which award-winning artists can claim an allowance to be added to their pensions after a similar law was passed for athletes in 2017.

Artists have been eligible for special pensions under a 1974 law benefiting persons of merit, which covers people from various walks of life under a vague set of criteria.

The new allowance would depend both on the kind of the accolade the eligible retired artist has won and on how much own old-age pension they have, where those with less would get a higher supplement.

The two annual recipients of the Prešeren Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the highest national honour in arts, are entitled to a 100% supplement to their own pension up to a maximum of €3,055 in total pension per month, meaning that if their pension is €1,000, they would get €2.055.

Other recipients are entitled to a 50% supplement. Those need to have won at least two awards, one of which has to be either a state decoration or the Prešeren Fund Prize, of which six are awarded a year, and the other from a list of what are now over 20 other awards. The list of the awards taken into account is not definitive.

SDS says bonuses to benefit privileged elite

Arguing that the bill provides an income guarantee to a specific cultural elite, the Democratic Party (SDS) party filed a referendum initiative and had been given until 26 March to collect 40,000 signatures required for the vote to be called, but declared on 20 March it had already collected 47,000.

The party's MP Zvonko Černač said they had nothing against rewarding special merits, but that such bonuses must be based on objective criteria, which the bill in question did not provide.

Under the bill "pensions of between €2,000 and €3,200 will be awarded to privileged persons, including people who are a disgrace for Slovenian culture and art", he said.

He claimed the amount of money a recipient of such a special bonus would receive in twenty years "exceeds half the value of the Nobel Prize".

Minister alleges manipulation

Culture Minister Asta Vrečko contested the SDS's calculations, accusing the party of lying and manipulating people's emotions to start its election campaign early at the expense of taxpayers.

The Culture Ministry's estimates show that four artists a year would be eligible for such an allowance, which the minister said would amount to between €65,000 and €75,000 on average annually.

Meanwhile, the National Electoral Commission has calculated the cost of the referendum on the bill could amount to about €6.6 million.

Data from the ZPIZ pension fund manager for 2023 shows that €737,000 was allocated for pensions to persons of merit under the 1974 law; of the total of 121 beneficiaries, 55 were the heirs of the deserving persons. Under the new law the allowance would not be inherited.

According to data from the Government Communication Office, 268 special pensions were awarded in the field of culture between 1993 and 2024, including 17 under two of the SDS-led governments (2004-2008 and 2020-2022) and four under the current Robert Golob government.

Contentious campaign poster

The SDS is planning to deliver the signatures to parliament in the coming days. Parliament then has seven days to call a referendum, which must be held in a window of between 30 and 45 days from the day the referendum is called, which means the likely voting day is in late April or early May.

The referendum campaign will officially start thirty days before voting day, but the SDS has been campaigning for weeks.

It has billboards around the country featuring the Prešeren Fund Prize-winning performance artist Maja Smrekar, whose 2017 performance involved a breastfeeding of a dog and which the SDS has for years been holding up as evidence of everything that is wrong with modern art.

Government parties have accused the SDS of wageing a culture war and of trying to label certain forms of art as "degenerate art," a concept that Nazi propagandists used to describe modern art. The Left has also said they will file a criminal complaint against the SDS for using the artist's work without her consent.

Meanwhile, a series of artists, cultural institutions, institutes and production teams have accused the SDS of abusing the image of Slovenian artists, their practices, achievements and works for its referendum campaign.