NEWS

Prime Minister Pahor receives representatives of the Hungarian national community in Slovenia

The Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia, Borut Pahor, today received the representatives of the Hungarian national community at Brdo pri Kranju. In his statement to the media, Prime Minister Pahor said that this was a working meeting which in his view could be divided into two parts. In the first part “we worked on understanding the meaning of tolerance and intolerance in a minority-to-majority relationship. We came to a conclusion that this involved no systematic tool used by either the government or the local policy to stir intolerance”, said the Prime Minister and advised that “we should be attentive to the phenomena of intolerance on both sides before these turn into a snowball". On this occasion, he expressed satisfaction with a fact that the minority community representatives also assessed the atmosphere as stimulating, however, “due to a general increase in intolerance as a result of the economic and social crisis worldwide, we should be even more on alert in order to prevent small problems from growing into big ones”, concluded the Prime Minister.

   

In the second part of the meeting, the discussion was aimed at concrete issues. The participants paid particular attention to the problem of issuing personal identity cards; they concluded that this issue required all due consideration in order to prevent it from growing into a big one. “This dialogue will be continued with, both the Hungarian national community deputy and with the community representatives”, said Pahor. As regards the issue of bilingual education, the participants agreed that cooperation in this field was good. They also touched on the idea of establishing a new public institute for scientific activities. Prime Minister Pahor said that “it remains to be seen to what extent and in what manner the government can be involved in the implementation of this idea”.