page_title: Janez Janša
section_title: 2004–2008 first term as prime minister
hierarchical_section_title: Janez Janša / Political career / 2004–2008 first term as prime minister
caption_attribution_description: Slovenščina: 8. vlada Republike Slovenije.
context_page_description: Ivan Janša, baptized and best known as Janez Janša, is a Slovenian politician serving as prime minister of Slovenia and the leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party since 1993. Internationally and domestically he is best known for having shifted from being an anti-communist pro-democracy fighter to one using an anti-migration and climate sceptic rhetoric in his political campaigns, calling critical journalists liars and “presstitutes.” His views are backed up by Nova24TV, funded by Hungarian figures close to Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Janša on the question of migration. He also shares the Hungarian and Polish governments' wish that the European Union would not lecture the ex-communist countries on democracy and rule of law.
context_section_description: Janša was prime minister of Slovenia for the first timefrom November 2004 to November 2008. During the term characterized by over-enthusiasm after joining EU, between 2005 and 2008 the Slovenian banks have seen loan-deposit ratio veering out of control, over-borrowing from foreign banks and then over-crediting private sector, leading to its unsustainable growth.
  It was also for the first time after 1992 that the president and the prime minister had represented opposing political factions for more than a few months. The relationship between Drnovšek and the government quickly became tense. After the landslide victory of the opposition candidate Danilo Türk in the 2007 presidential election, Janša filed a Motion of Confidence in the government on 15 November 2007, stating that the opposition's criticism was interfering with the government's work during Slovenia's presidency over the European Union. The government won the vote, held on 19 November, with 51 votes supporting it and 33 opposing it. In the speech delivered after the vote, Janša announced, among other, an intensification of the fight against financial criminality and the illegal concentration of capital in the hands of single powerful managers, to whom he referred as tycoons. In the following months, the Slovenian police and public prosecution launched a full-scale investigation against some of the biggest companies in the country, namely against the Laško Brewery Concern.
  In the beginning of December 2011, several clips of the recordings of closed sessions of the Government of Slovenia during the term of Janez Janša were published on the video-sharing website YouTube.
  Allegations were made against Janez Janša that he tried to subordinate Slovenian media. On 1 September 2008, some three weeks before the Slovenian parliamentary elections, allegations were made in Finnish TV in a documentary broadcast by the Finnish national broadcasting company YLE that Janša had received bribes from the Finnish defense company Patria (73.2% of which is the property of the Finnish government) in the so-called Patria case. Janša rejected all accusations as a media conspiracy concocted by left-wing Slovenian journalists, and demanded YLE to provide evidence or to retract the story. Janša's naming of individual journalists, including some of those behind the 2007 Petition Against Political Pressure on Slovenian Journalists, and the perceived use of diplomatic channels in an attempt to coerce the Finnish government into interfering with YLE editorial policy, drew criticism from media freedom organizations, such as the International Press Institute and European branch of International Federation of Journalists whose representative, Aidan White, IFJ general secretary, said "The (Janša's) government is distorting the facts, failing to tell Slovenians the truth and trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the European public about its attitude to media".
caption: Janez Janša's cabinet in 2004
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