The demise of Slovenia

Introduction

Slovenia, a beautiful country in the Balkans. World-renowned for its stunning natural landscapes, the country is often described as the “greatest” and “most powerful” in the Balkan region. However, as is the case with many popular tourist destinations, the reality of life in Slovenia for its residents is quite different from the idyllic image presented to visitors.

Waiting for never

Driving Exam/Test Waiting Time

Let’s take a look at the event that triggered me to finally write this article. Slovenia is the country I was born in and the country where I’ve lived for the vast majority of my life. I’ve also lived in Croatia, Germany and Ireland for significant periods of time, so my view of the world is not limited to this chicken-shaped country.

This morning at 07.29 AM an article was released by the journal 24ur, one of the most famous journalistic organizations in Slovenia.

Screenshot captured from 24ur.com at 14:45 on 28.04.2025

The title of the article? Four full months of waiting time to be able to take the practical exam for your car drivers’ license. I was appalled by this, so I had to verify it by myself by going to the official government website for checking available dates.

Screenshot captured from https://e-uprava.gov.si/javne-evidence at 14:47 on 28.04.2025

Low and behold, not only is it true, the dates are even further away! Today’s date is 28.04 and the first available date is 03.09! The 24ur article mentions that after new year the waiting time was around 2.5 months, which means that since the current waiting time is 4.1 months there has been an insane increase of 64% in the waiting time to take your practical exam for your car drivers’ license in only 4 months! Not only is this an incredibly unacceptable waiting time, you also need to go IN PERSON to sign up for this date, you can’t do it online in this day and age, an absolute failure of the Slovenian system. The same is true for the theoretical drivers’ exam that you need to pass before you can even signup for the practical exam. For that one the waiting time seems to be a few days above a month, so around 1.05 months. In total you need at least half a year to pass the exam if you pass everything first try, which most people do not. And even fewer people will do so now, imagine having to wait 4 months to do your exam after you are ready to take it? Of course you will forget an incredible amount of information.

Slovenian population density, you can guess in which areas the waiting times are 4.1 months and in which they are “only” 1.5 months.

There is a way around this, you can go drive to the cities of Velenje, Nova Gorica or Trbovlje! These cities “only” have a wait time of around 1.5 months, but they are far away from any populous cities in Slovenia, most of them on extreme edges of the country. Not only is this your only option if you want to get this done sooner, but you will also have to spend some time and a lot of money driving there to get used to it, otherwise you have very little hope of passing the exam. The current absolute cheapest price for an hour of driving with an instructor (20 of which are mandatory to be able to attend the practical exam) is 43 euros! We need to keep in mind, that very rarely is anything that is the cheapest also of good quality. The current hourly minimum net wage as of 2024 is 6.20 euros¹, meaning you need to work 6.94 hours just to afford an hour of the CHEAPEST driving school, absurd!

Not only are the aforementioned prices and waiting times becoming dystopian, driving will soon be a novelty in Slovenia, accessible only to the upper middle class. You can say “oh one working day to pay an hour of driving doesn’t sound that bad?”. And yes, you can say that, but if you even think about bringing up this argument you are for sure in the priviliged class economically, because not only are the prices of driving school exponentially rising, the prices of everything else that is considered a basic necessity are also rising far beyond any reasonable rate. Wages are not even remotely keeping up with the cost of living in Slovenia, yet the country still refuses to lower the taxation on wages. A person that needs to spend upwards of 50% of their check on rent. The average monthly net wage is currently 1.550,03². But the vast majority of people who want to get their drivers license are young adults and students, vast majority of whom do not have full-time jobs and their perks, they are tied to the student minimum wage which is slightly higher at 6.32 euros net per hour.

Slovenian Youth

You may ask yourself, why is nobody doing anything to improve this situation? Well, let’s look for answers. They are quite obvious. First let us take a look at the age pyramid in Slovenia.

Slovenian age population pyramid as of 2020, the latest one I could find. Data is from the US Census Bureau International Data Base.

As we can see an overwhelming majority of persons living in Slovenia are aged 30+, and a supermajority are aged 40 and higher. All of these people enjoyed the benefits of post-Yugoslavian Slovenian benefits, meaning the price they paid for things such as driving school hours, rent and other basic needs were exponentially lower compared to wages than they are now. Especially the most important one - a place to live. The wage needed to take a housing loan to buy an apartment or a house has increased to such insane unfathomable amounts. Only persons in the most lucrative professions and persons with wealthy families can dream of owning a place in the year 2025, for the vast majority Slovenian youth this is (and will likely forever remain) an unachievable dream. The older generation reaped every benefit possible and closed the ladder behind them. They are voting for their own benefit and ignoring the needs of the youth, robbing them of opportunities that they themselves not only enjoyed, but also heavily benefitted from.

Let’s take a look at the real estate market price changes since 2008, I’ve added a cummulative column so we can see the total damage that has been done in the past 17 years, as of 2025. This data is very difficult to verify and come by, as are many things in Slovenia, but I did my best to find as accurate information as possible, all the figures below are directly from one or another government source in Slovenia, there were some data discrepancies from different sources within the government, so I just took the average values for those. Most of the data is acquired with queries from the stat.si website.

All the wages are averages, not medians, the medians are lower but the data for that is either inaccessible or non-existent to the public.

Year	Nominal (%)	Cumulative Nominal (%)	Property Value (€)	Cumulative Nominal Since 2015 (%)	Cumulative Net Salary Change (%)
2007	Base Value	Base Value	100,000.00
2008	-0.16	-0.16	99,840.00
2009	-8.12	-8.27	91,732.99
2010	-0.15	-8.40	91,595.39
2011	1.37	-7.15	92,850.25
2012	-8.83	-15.35	84,651.57
2013	-4.38	-18.94	80,936.10
2014	-4.39	-22.38	77,394.04	Base Value	Base Value
2015	0.05	-22.28	77,432.71	0.05	-0.10
2016	6.89	-16.37	82,774.19	6.95	1.69
2017	9.87	-8.42	90,957.87	17.63	3.68
2018	8.27	-0.83	98,473.08	27.11	6.96
2019	4.83	3.94	103,230.96	33.02	10.83
2020	5.17	9.30	108,569.03	40.00	17.89
2021	15.77	26.25	125,705.93	63.34	25.61
2022	11.59	41.57	140,266.48	83.48	27.60
2023	6.77	51.14	149,768.51	96.27	40.09
2024	8.50	64.32	162,495.33	113.73	44.41

If you want a visual representation, below is a graphical visualization that I made with the matplotlib library.

Housing prices over the years in Slovenia.

Sources

1. Zakon o minimalni plači (ZMinP) ↩︎

2. Povprečna mesečna neto plača je povprečni mesečni znesek, izplačan zaposlenim pri pravnih osebah za delo v polnem delovnem času ali delovnem času, krajšem od polnega delovnega časa, in za nadure, ter nadomestila plače, ki bremenijo delodajalca, zmanjšan za prispevke za socialno varnost in akontacijo dohodnine. ↩︎