Slovenia
Presidential Elections
Electoral system
The president of Slovenia is elected through a direct popular vote for a four-year term. The electoral system is based on the majoritarian two-round system. Voters casts a single vote for their favored candidate and if no candidate receives a majority of the votes, a second election round is organized in which only the two top runners stand against one another.
Latest elections
For the 2007 Presidential elections seven candidates competed in the first round. Lojze Peterle (independent candidate, former leader of Slovene Christian Democrats and supported by NSi, SDS and SLS) came out as the winner of the first round, ahead of Danilo Türk (independent candidate but supported by the governing coalition; SD, DeSUS and ZARES). Mitja Gaspari, independent candidate but supported by LDS, came third, only 0.4 percentage point behind Türk, and Zmago Jelinčič Plemeniti (leader of the Slovenian National Party) came fourth. In the second round Türk emerged as the solid winner, with 68.03 percent of the votes, against 31.97 percent for Peterle.
The success of the two center-left candidates (Türk and Gaspari) and especially Danilo Türk's victory at the final round held an important symbolic meaning in national politics as the center-right government had been losing support during 2007 while the center-left parties (especially Pahor's Social Democrats) had been gaining (Fink-Hafner, 2008). The success of the center-left parties would continue in the 2008 Parliamentary elections.
Election results 2007 - round 2. Electoral Districts
Sources:
Stöver, Philip, and Andreas Wüst. 2005. Electoral Systems
Fink-Hafner, D. 2008. European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 47(7-8), 1132-1139.
