The year 2025 featured expectations with respect to the upcoming spring 2026 elections. There were many political developments that, among others, led to two legislative referendums as well as several interpellations raised by opposition (centre-)right parties, which however did not cause any ministers to lose their positions. The centre-left governmental coalition encountered reform tiredness and growing criticism of its weak implementation in a number of key policy areas, with the Long-Term Care Law being a special concern after suffering repeated problems implementing it. Still, the government could point to some reforms made, like in the healthcare system where it claimed it had further assured that the public system would continue and also be improved. Pension system reform was another more important reform and it was supported by all partners of the tripartite Economic and Social Council. Nevertheless, several government decisions were strongly criticised by employers’ organisations.

This article presents the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the mainstream music in Slovenia, a small and peripheral music market shaped by global trends and regional pop-cultural history. Drawing on survey data on musical preferences (2021) and radio airplays from 2017 to 2022, the study combines big data methodologies with a reflexive theoretical approach about mainstream music as a meta-genre. The findings expose the relational structure of audience taste, revealing genre clusters that reflect cultural divides between global and local, and a dual mainstream formation in the radio’s airplay: one driven by seasonal, high-rotation global hits, and another composed of canonized domestic and regional evergreens. This layered formation illustrates how institutional repetition and audience selection reproduce the status quo in contemporary cultural industries, while constraining aesthetic innovation, marginalizing younger local artists, and reinforcing generational divides within the Slovenian music landscape.

Agricultural intensification has profoundly transformed Europe’s landscapes, driving widespread declines in farmland bird populations. Among the most pressing threats is the loss of meadows, either through conversion to arable land as a result of intensification, or through agropastoral abandonment leading to shrub encroachment. Although farmland bird populations in Central and Eastern Europe have historically declined more slowly than in other regions, recent evidence shows that even once-common species are now in decline. This highlights the urgent need to quantify these trends and identify their underlying drivers. In this study, we investigate habitat preferences and factors underlying the severe, over 30-year decline of Red-backed Shrike Lanius collurio, an iconic farmland species and key bioindicator of grassland biodiversity. Our research focused on a 440-ha alluvial floodplain in Slovenia’s Sub-Pannonian region, a site considered a national stronghold for the species. Territory surveys were conducted intermittently from 1992 to 2025, with detailed habitat mapping available from 2004 to 2022. Consistent with previous studies, our results indicated that breeding Red-backed Shrikes primarily occupied ecotonal habitats marked by extensive meadow cover, moderate shrub density, and high habitat heterogeneity. Alarmingly, between 1992 and 2025, the population declined by 92.44%, decreasing from 172 territories to just 13. The steep decline observed was likely driven by agricultural intensification, persisting under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with conversion of meadows into arable land and the loss of traditional management leading to shrub encroachment. The latter emerged as the strongest predictor of population decline in the most recent years. Our findings emphasise the urgent need to protect, manage, and restore meadows to prevent further biodiversity loss. Considering the relatively better historical status of farmland bird populations in Central and Eastern Europe compared with their Western European counterparts, this worrying trend indicates that similar declines are likely widespread, highlighting the need for immediate research and targeted conservation efforts.

This study examines how Slovenian communist leadership’s views on the Yugoslav state framework evolved in the late 1980s. To this end, the actions of Slovenian leaders during the procedure of amending the Yugoslav constitution and the discussions in the Slovenian party headquarters on the subject of relations in the federation are analyzed in detail. On the background of growing nationalism in public opinion in Slovenia, the communist leaders of the republic put themselves in an increasingly antagonistic position vis-à-vis the federal center. During 1987, they rejected several proposals for changes to the Yugoslav constitution, which they had initially agreed to based on an incorrect assessment of Slovenian public opinion. Then, in the summer of 1988, in the atmosphere of the Slovenian Spring, local leaders began to favor the weakening of the ties between the Yugoslav republics and redefinition of Yugoslavia as a confederation. Simultaneously, Slovenian politicians were also increasingly questioning some primary assumptions about the existence of the common state and radicalized their political methods in terms of promoting Slovenian interests at the federal level.

The objective of the article is to establish why a financial bonus for Slovenian–Italian bilingualism was introduced in the District of Koper (comprising today’s Slovenian municipalities of Ankaran, Koper, Izola and Piran), which came under Yugoslav rule after 1954. Using Brubaker’s triadic nexus concept and analysis of newly discovered archival sources, the authors found that (a) on the federal level, Yugoslavia only focused on minority protection as much as it was required to by international agreements and treaties, (b) the Italian minority itself was not a relevant actor in the Yugoslav system of minority protection, (c) Italy had a marginal role in the process of protecting the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and (d) the political elite in Yugoslavia introduced the bilingualism bonus to encourage the integration of the Italian minority when building a new (socialist) sociopolitical order. The Slovenian-Italian bilingualism bonus was therefore not an altruist measure directed at minority protection, but rather a self-serving measure by the authorities to reinforce their power.

The burial of multiple individuals within a single funerary monument invites speculation about the relationships between the deceased: were they chosen on the basis of status, gender or relatedness, for example? Here, the authors present the results of aDNA and isotope analyses conducted on seven individuals from an Early Iron Age barrow at Dolge njive, south-eastern Slovenia. All seven individuals are close biological relatives. While the group composition suggests strict adherence to neither patrilineal nor matrilineal structures, the funerary tradition appears highly gendered, and family links through both the male and female lines seem important in structuring of the community. The results have implications for understanding of kinship and funerary practices in late prehistoric Europe.

Lack of economic data based on ethnicity makes the study of minority economies in linguistically or ethnically mixed regions problematic. Yet, there is much to learn from these hard cases of economic development in terms of the policies that guarantee ethnic or linguistic survival and reproduction. The present article investigates the long-term economic development of the Slovenian minority in Italy between 1954 and 2020. It does so by applying the theoretical framework by new institutional economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2005), which looks at the dynamic role of political and economic institutions for the generation of economic growth. The parable of this community’s economy shows that political power and economic success can be flimsy and ephemeral. Strategic, long-term economic planning and, especially, contingent planning against foreseeable risks, both of which require the systematic collection of accurate data and the coordination of representative organizations, are key to successful reproduction and sustained growth.

Musical creativity is represented through the activity of “creation” in the curricula for music education in both Montenegrin and Slovenian primary schools. Starting from the assumption that this activity is insufficiently realised, a survey of the teaching practice of the specialist music teachers in the two countries was conducted (N = 154). The obtained results show that creative musical activities are moderately represented in teaching practice and that Slovenian teachers achieve programme-defined goals related to the activities through which pupils create their own music to a greater extent. The results also indicate the particular circumstances that, in real school conditions, make it difficult to systematically realise this activity within regular music classes.

Nematodes of the genus Gongylonema infect a wide range of mammals worldwide but are only sporadically reported in humans. We describe a case of human infection with Gongylonema pulchrum in a 41-year-old man. The patient extracted the nematode from the submucosa under his tongue and correctly self-diagnosed the infection with the help of the Google search engine. In the laboratory, the collected nematode was confirmed as G. pulchrum microscopically by morphological analysis and genetically by amplifying and sequencing the parasite's rDNA. This is the first report of human G. pulchrum infection in Slovenia.