Janez Janša spent eighteen months in a communist prison before becoming Slovenia's Prime Minister four times. When Stefan spoke to him in Ljubljana, the conversation ranged from migration and Russia to Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Yet almost every answer returned to the same place: history.
A Prison Cell
Few serving European leaders have lived a political life quite like Janez Janša.
Long before becoming Slovenia's Prime Minister, he was arrested by Yugoslavia's secret political police, prosecuted before a military court and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. More than three decades later, he has returned to office for a fourth time, making him one of Europe's longest-serving conservative leaders. It is an extraordinary political journey, and one that continues to shape how he understands the world today.
Janša described being prosecuted for what today would almost be called a thought crime. According to him, investigators discovered notes in his desk which they claimed proved he intended to write something critical of the communist regime. Nothing had been published. Nothing had been distributed. Yet intention itself became sufficient grounds for prosecution. When asked what defence had been available, Janša's answer was simple: there was none. The verdict, in his view, had already been decided before the trial even began.
His military cell measured barely ten square metres. There was no running water, no toilet and almost no privacy. Prisoners had to ask permission even for food, water and access to basic facilities. During the day they were forbidden from lying on their beds and instead spent hours standing inside the small room. The purpose, he argued, was not merely imprisonment but humiliation.
Perhaps the most unexpected moment came when he was asked what prison had ultimately taught him.
"They made me famous."
Instead of silencing him, the communist authorities transformed him into one of Slovenia's best-known dissidents. Looking back, Janša almost described his imprisonment as the regime's greatest political mistake.
That experience still shapes his politics. Throughout the interview, Janša repeatedly returned to one idea: societies rarely lose their freedoms suddenly. They lose them gradually, through institutions, intimidation and the slow erosion of public confidence.
The Same Goal, Different Methods
Although Janša's life story naturally dominates the beginning of the conversation, the interview quickly moves beyond biography.
The central question becomes whether the ideological battles shaping today's West are genuinely new, or whether they are simply older conflicts being fought by different means.
Janša's answer is unequivocal.
"The same goal, different methods."
He argues that twentieth-century communism attempted to reshape society through revolution and violence. That strategy ultimately failed. According to Janša, Antonio Gramsci reached the conclusion that communist movements would never succeed in Western Europe through force alone. Instead, they would have to influence society gradually by gaining cultural rather than political dominance.
That, Janša believes, is where universities, schools, the media and other cultural institutions become central.
Rather than taking power through revolution, he argues, influence is accumulated over decades by shaping the institutions responsible for educating future generations and defining acceptable public opinion. Throughout the interview he repeatedly returned to Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind, arguing that these ideas form part of a continuous intellectual tradition rather than isolated political debates.
For Janša, contemporary debates surrounding education, culture, national identity and public institutions are not separate controversies. They are connected by a much larger question: what values ultimately define Western civilisation, and who gets to shape them? History is the lens through which the present becomes intelligible.
The Border Is Only the Beginning
Despite his international reputation as one of Europe's most outspoken conservative leaders on migration, Janša spent surprisingly little time discussing border fences themselves. Instead, he spoke about political judgment.
Looking back at the migration crisis of 2015, he argued that Slovenia's left-wing government initially failed to respond as tens of thousands of migrants crossed the country. The irony, he recalled, was that politicians who had strongly criticised Viktor Orbán for building Hungary's border fence later found themselves travelling to Budapest seeking assistance in constructing one of their own.
His criticism extended to more recent migration policy. Passport controls at official crossings, he argued, achieve very little when illegal migrants simply avoid the checkpoints before claiming asylum once inside Slovenia. Effective border policy, in his view, requires controlling the border itself rather than focusing on legal travellers while illegal crossings continue elsewhere.
One exchange from the interview stood out above all the others. Janša recalled attending a conference in Morocco where he asked a government minister why so many Moroccan nationals appeared among illegal migrants arriving in Slovenia. According to Janša, the minister smiled before replying with a question of his own.
"Why are you accepting them?"
Janša admitted that the answer caught him completely by surprise. The minister allegedly explained that many leaving Morocco were not escaping war or persecution but attempting to avoid prosecution for criminal offences. Europe, he suggested, had chosen to import a problem that other countries were content to export. When Janša protested that Morocco was effectively exporting its criminals, the minister simply repeated his original question.
"Why are you accepting them?"
Whether readers accept Janša's interpretation or not, the anecdote captures an important feature of his thinking. Throughout the interview he consistently argued that migration cannot be understood solely by examining the countries migrants leave behind. European governments, he believes, have also shaped the incentives that encourage people to come.
At the same time, Janša repeatedly distinguished between refugees fleeing war and those travelling through multiple safe countries before claiming asylum elsewhere. He pointed to Slovenia's response during the Bosnian war and, more recently, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, noting that in both cases the country accepted large numbers of refugees, primarily women and children, with broad public support. According to Janša, Slovenians understood the difference between humanitarian protection and what he described as abuse of Europe's asylum system. It is a distinction he believes much of Western Europe has gradually lost.
History Doesn't Stay in the Past
It became clear that Janša does not view migration, communism, Russia or today's culture wars as separate political subjects. He sees them as chapters of the same historical story. That perspective also shapes how he thinks about Russia.
Although Janša was among the first European leaders to travel to Kyiv following Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, he was equally critical of what he regarded as the West's mistakes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than helping post-communist societies build genuinely free institutions, he argued, many Western governments became preoccupied with economic cooperation, trade and investment while underestimating the importance of political transformation. According to Janša, that failure created conditions that eventually allowed authoritarianism to return in a different form. Putin's Russia, he argued, did not emerge in isolation. It was also the product of opportunities missed after the Soviet system collapsed.
Our conversation then moved to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Reflecting on The Gulag Archipelago, Stefan raised one of the book's most powerful passages. Solzhenitsyn writes that one of the greatest tragedies of communist repression was not simply the imprisonment or execution of dissidents, but the countless books that were never written because their authors had been silenced. Entire generations of intellectual life disappeared before those ideas could ever reach the public.
Janša immediately recognised the significance of that observation. For him, the legacy of totalitarianism is measured not only by those who were imprisoned or killed, but also by everything that never had the opportunity to exist. Lost generations leave intellectual voids that societies may spend decades trying to rebuild.
The discussion then shifted once again, this time to the large pro-Palestinian demonstrations seen across much of the West.
Janša argued that many observers struggle to understand the apparent alliance between progressive movements and Islamist activists because they examine each political controversy separately. Returning once more to Gramsci and the long ideological history discussed earlier, he suggested these alliances become easier to understand when viewed as part of broader political strategies rather than isolated events. Whether readers accept that interpretation or reject it, it was clear that Janša sees contemporary political coalitions through the same historical framework that shaped every other answer during the conversation.
The interview ended somewhere unexpected. China.
Janša recalled an official visit to Beijing in 2007 during which a senior Chinese official privately warned him that future generations of Chinese leaders would no longer remember the horrors of the Cultural Revolution because they would never have experienced them. Another official remarked - half jokingly, half seriously - that many young Chinese believed Coca-Cola had been invented in China.
Janša laughed as he recounted the story. The point, however, was anything but humorous. Societies that lose their historical memory, he argued, eventually lose the ability to recognise old dangers when they return in new forms. That warning, rather than migration or even Russia, was how he chose to conclude the conversation.
