Janez Janša

Biography

Janez Janša was born Ivan Janša in Grosuplje in 1958 into a Catholic working-class family. He joined the League of Communists at seventeen and led a defence committee of the Socialist Youth, but was expelled in 1983 after criticising the Yugoslav doctrine of people's self-defence. He studied at the University of Ljubljana and, barred from state jobs, made a living as a computer programmer and mountain guide while writing critical articles on the Yugoslav People's Army for the magazine Mladina.

On 31 May 1988 he was arrested for possessing a classified military document and, with two Mladina journalists and an army sergeant, tried by a military court in Serbo-Croatian and behind closed doors. The JBTZ trial, which brought him an 18-month sentence, set off mass protests and the founding of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, and it helped speed Slovenia's democratisation.

Janša co-founded the opposition Slovenian Democratic Union in 1989 and after the first free elections in 1990 became defence minister, organising Slovenia's defence against the Yugoslav army in the Ten-Day War of 1991. He then joined the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia, became its president in May 1993 and stayed defence minister until his dismissal in March 1994; he held the post again briefly in 2000. Under his leadership the party, later renamed the Slovenian Democratic Party, became the country's leading right-wing force.

Janša was prime minister from 2004 to 2008, when Slovenia held the presidency of the Council of the European Union, and again in 2012-2013 until his government lost a no-confidence vote. His 2013 conviction for corruption in the Patria case fell away after the Constitutional Court ordered a retrial and the case expired. He led a third government from 2020 to 2022 and returned as prime minister in 2026.