Slovenian president set to beat ex-comic in election runoff

Bloomberg

Slovenian President Borut Pahor has one obstacle on his path to re-election: a comedian-turned-mayor who vows to shake up the political establishment and replace the head of the central bank.
Pahor, a former Social Democrat prime minister, is set to win Sunday’s runoff with more than 56 percent of vote, a poll by Episcenter conducted for the Delo newspaper showed. He would be the first Slovenian president in 15 years to claim a second term. In the first round of voting three weeks ago, he fell short of the 50 percent needed for outright victory, garnering 47 percent. His rival in the European Union and euro-area nation, Marjan Sarec, got 25 percent.
“Pahor appears to have a decent
lead, but not an unbeatable one,” Otilia Dhand, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence
in Brussels, said by phone. “The runoff
is thus a battle to watch rather than a
foregone conclusion.”
While largely ceremonial, presidential powers in the ex-Yugoslav country of 2 million people, birthplace of Melania Trump, include proposing candidates to lead the central bank. That role carries with it a seat on the European Central Bank’s rate-setting panel. The runoff will also hint at voters’ appetite for potential newcomers to test Prime Minister Miro Cerar’s three-party coalition at parliamentary elections next year. The government is set to become the first to finish a full term since 2007.
The 54-year-old Pahor has already completed an unlikely comeback. Forced out of government in 2011 as voters rejected his plan to tackle fallout from the global financial crisis, he recovered to win the presidency just a year later.
Pahor’s upstart challenger is the 39-year-old mayor of Kamnik, a town of 29,000 people located 22 kilometers north of the capital, Ljubljana. Sarec, who’s coy on whether he’ll create a party to run for parliament, accuses the incumbent of dodging tough decisions on health care, the corruption commission and a 3.2
billion-euro ($3.7 billion) bank rescue.