The Power of the People in the Constitutional Development of the Republic of Slovenia 1991–2023

The author first discusses the procedure established for amending the Consti- tution of the Republic of Slovenia, as determined by the Slovenian legal order. He presents the dominant proponents of constitutional amendments in the Republic of Slovenia and to what extent the process of preparing a proposal for constitutional amendments is people-friendly or feasible. He also presents whether the constitutional development was dominated by the initiatives of the people, the government or parliamentarians or political parties. In additi- on, the author gives a chronological presentation of all 11 amendments to the Constitution so far, with a brief presentation of the essence of the amendment. He also deals with the dominant reasons for the constitutional changes and whether the development of the constitutionality was planned, considered, professionally justified and to what extent it was a matter of more or less for- tunate individual political projects. In the second chapter, the author presents numerous ideas, initiatives and proposals for de lege ferenda amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia and briefly evaluates them from the perspective of their feasibility (reality for political consensus) and above all from the point of view of the consistency of constitutional development. He is trying to answer the question of whether the constitutional review process is favourable to the possibility that the people will implement their proposal for constitutional changes, especially where it is objectively impossible to expect (based on several decades of experience) that they will obtain a sufficient ma- jority of deputies in the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia. In ma- king these judgments, he relies on the analysis of the case of long-term efforts by civil society for a more thorough renovation of the electoral system, which turned out to be completely unrealisable, and he asks, or rather tries to answer, where there is a way out of such a dead end.

Key words: constitutional review procedure, constitutional amendments to date, proposals for constitutional amendments, constitutional initiatives, reform of the electoral system.