The Slovenian prime minister’s discriminatory language against Kosovo Albanians

Janez Janša is convinced that a worker from Kosovo who comes to Slovenia is not an added value “from the Slovenian national perspective.” This right-wing populist language singles out only Albanians, even though Slovenia has more workers from Bosnia and Serbia. The Slovenian economy is asking for the workers; no one is going to that country illegally.

Enver Robelli

Slovenia’s Prime Minister, Janez Janša, this week delivered a speech before Slovenian businesspeople. On that occasion he criticized the work permits Slovenia issues to citizens of other countries. These number around 150,000 work permits issued last year. These people do not come to Slovenia illegally. The Slovenian economy needs them. Construction, gastronomy and many other areas of the economy face a shortage of workers.

Janša singled out Albanians and said that a worker from Kosovo who works in a municipal enterprise, receives the minimum wage and brings his family is, “from the national perspective,” not an added value for Slovenia. This is discriminatory language that divides people into different classes and calls some of them – in this case Albanians – people of lesser value (or worthless for Slovenia).

According to the Statistical Office of Slovenia, cited by the portal N1 Slovenija, at the end of 2025 almost 30,000 Albanians with Kosovar citizenship lived in Slovenia. Around 11,000 of them were women. Over the last two years the number of workers from Kosovo in Slovenia has fallen. In March 2024 there were around 16,600, in March 2025 just under 15,400, and in May 2026 there were 15,238. There are more workers in Slovenia from Bosnia and Serbia, but Janša did not mention them. For the unwanted foreigners from the former Yugoslav space, Janša and his supporters have established the insulting terms “trenirkarji” (tracksuit wearers) and “opankarji” (peasant-sandal wearers).

Janša has several times been under investigation for corruption – he calls the accusations against him a conspiracy of communist networks which, according to him, are still active in Slovenia from Yugoslav times. A German newspaper has ironically described Janša as a “communist-eater”; other critics call him “the Trump from Triglav,” referring to Slovenia’s highest peak.

For years Janša has positioned himself as an opponent of immigration; some critics have compared him with Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s longtime prime minister. Janša returned to power this year for the fourth time since Slovenia’s independence and is governing with the support of a party accused of being pro-Russian. That party is called Resni.ca and is led by Zoran Stevanovič, who is of Serbian origin. Stevanovič was elected by Janša’s party, the SDS, to the post of Speaker of the Parliament of Slovenia. Pro-regime media in Belgrade call Stevanovič “Putin’s extended hand” and stress that he is against “the secession of Kosovo.” But it seems Stevanovič, a former policeman, is not blind to reality, and so recently received Kosovo’s ambassador in Ljubljana in a meeting.

During the election campaign, Janša was supported by dubious Israelis and immediately after returning to power positioned himself as a supporter of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is welcome almost nowhere in Europe because of the Israeli forces’ war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population after Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Critics accused Janša of having engaged, during the election campaign, the Israeli private espionage firm “Black Cube” to discredit political opponents and manipulate the elections. Janša admitted he had met people from Israel – “for private reasons.”

Janša’s government has already lifted the ban on exports of military weapons to Israel, and also on imports from there. It has likewise repealed the ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Immediately after taking office, Janša ordered the Palestinian flag to be removed from the government building in Ljubljana. In early September, Israel opened its first resident embassy in the Slovenian capital. Minister Gideon Sa’ar took part in the ceremony together with Janša. Hundreds of Slovenes protested against the opening. Israel’s hope is that Janša will block EU policies – for example if sanctions against Netanyahu’s government are considered or decided in Brussels.

Janša had promised he would annul Slovenia’s recognition of Palestine, but meanwhile speaks only of a “freeze” of the recognition. He has also warned that he will move Slovenia’s Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but that has not yet happened. The only European state that has agreed to open an embassy in Jerusalem is Kosovo. In the Arab world this has caused irritation. Kosovo and Serbia committed before Donald Trump in 2020 to open their embassies in Jerusalem. But Serbia never did so; Belgrade’s main diplomatic representation remains in Tel Aviv.

In 2020, Janša was the first prime minister from Europe to congratulate Donald Trump on victory in the presidential elections – even though the whole world had understood that he had lost the elections and that the new U.S. president had become Joe Biden. Although he is a critic of immigration and of the EU in general, Janša, however, is no great sympathizer of Putin, as Hungary’s Orbán has been. Janša supports the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian dictator and the EU sanctions against Russia.

On the eve of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, Janša was an opponent of Greater Serbian hegemonization. As a young journalist, he was accused and brought before a military court after reporting on Belgrade’s plans to violently suppress the Slovenian movement for pluralism and independence. In the 1990s, during the war in Yugoslavia, Janša was accused of illegal arms trading. In 2008 it was alleged that he had taken bribes from a Finnish armaments firm.

When Slovenia became independent in 1991, around 25,000 people from other parts of Yugoslavia, among them Albanians too, lost all their rights. From then on, they were considered illegal immigrants. Families were separated and destroyed, and there were also cases of suicide. In 2023, the government led by liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob apologized for Slovenia’s behavior towards this category.