Slovenia ‘s President on Monday (March 23, 2026) urged the country’s political parties to start talks on forming a new government as soon as possible after a parliamentary election on the weekend in the European Union country ended with no clear winner and the main players practically tied.

Prime Minister Robert Golob’s liberal Freedom Movement won 29 seats in the 90-member assembly while the opposition right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party, or SDS, won 28, according to preliminary results of 99.85% of votes counted by the state election authorities.

The outcome means that no party has a clear majority of 46 seats and that a future government will depend on smaller parties that emerged as kingmakers following the vote. It was not immediately clear what shape potential future alliances might take.

“I urge them to sit down at the negotiating table as soon as possible,” President Natasa Pirc Musar said on X. She congratulated the pro-EU ruling Freedom Movement party, which had a lead of less than 1%, describing it as “the relative winner” of the election.

Sunday’s vote was seen as a key test of whether the EU member nation stays on its liberal course or sways toward the right. The undecided outcome also reflects deep divisions among Slovenia’s 1.7 million eligible voters.

Mr. Golob’s government has been a strong liberal voice in the 27-nation EU. SDS leader Janez Jansa is a populist-style politician and a close ally of nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His return to power would be a boost to Europe’s right-wing blocs.

Mr. Golob on Sunday evening thanked the voters on the relative victory, saying that “we have remained the leading party.” He predicted “tough weeks ahead” when he will meet with parliamentary parties to try to find common ground.

Mr. Jansa, an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump, said his party would not want to form a weak coalition government. He said a “balance of political powers … based on what we see now, will not provide much stability.”

The vote was held after a heated campaign that featured allegations of foreign interference and corruption, further whipping already heightened political tensions between the two opposed blocs.

Pensioner Rajko Campa, from the capital Ljubljana, said he was surprised by the election results and that he supported Jansa’s conservatives, arguing that it is healthy to change those in power every few years.

Slovenia routinely has switched between the right and left-leaning blocks since it broke away from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. The Alpine nation of 2 million people became a member of NATO and the EU in 2004.

Polls ‌opened on Sunday (March 22, 2026) in Slovenia’s election pitting incumbent liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob against right-wing populist Janez Jansa, with neither looking set to win ⁠a parliamentary majority in the vote that could be decided by smaller coalition partners.

Nearly 1.7 million Slovenians will be able to cast votes at polling stations that opened at 7 a.m. (0600 ‌GMT) across the Alpine country and will close at 7 p.m. The election commission is expected to announce the preliminary results after 8:30 ‌p.m.

The latest opinion polls indicated pro-Donald Trump Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and Golob’s ‌Freedom ⁠Movement (GS) were set for a close race after an eleventh-hour ⁠campaign drama involving allegations of foreign meddling and graft.

Mr. Jansa said the vote is one of the most important in Slovenia’s 35 years of independence and will decide the future direction of the country.

“I hope that Slovenia will get rid of ‌the organised criminal organisation,” he told reporters after casting his vote in the village of Arnace, 85 km northwest of the capital Ljubljana.

Analysts say Mr. Jansa, who is seeking a fourth term as premier of the European Union and NATO ‌member state of 2 million people, has a devoted voter base and the lower the turnout, the higher the chances of him winning the election.

At stake is Slovenia’s domestic and foreign agenda, where the outgoing ⁠government had focused on social and health reforms but delivered mixed results.

Mr. Jansa has promised to introduce tax breaks for businesses and cut funding for civil society, welfare and ‌media. Pro-Israeli Mr. Jansa, who is an ally of Hungary’s veteran nationalist leader Viktor Orban, would also likely change Golob’s foreign policy under which Slovenia was one of the few European countries that recognised an independent Palestinian state and last year imposed an arms embargo on Israel.

Dirty campaign, graft allegations, foreign meddling fears

The election campaign, which observers described as dirty from the start, heated up this month when covert videos ‌were published on an anonymous website purportedly exposing government corruption. A report this week alleged that Mr. Jansa met with officials from Israeli private spy firm Black Cube, which LinkedIn alleged in 2023 was behind a hidden camera campaign that targeted activists and ⁠journalists in the lead-up to Hungary’s 2022 vote.

Ifigenija Simonovic, a 73-year-old writer, said that ⁠she did not like the language and rudeness seen in the election campaign.

“No politeness, some lies that came out on one side or the other ‌so I didn’t feel they were telling us, the voters, the story that we could follow,” Ms. Simonovic said after casting her vote in Ljubljana. “So, to decide today it really wasn’t easy,” she said.