Svoboda wants to halve fuel retailers' margins. Litre would be just over five cents cheaper.

Diesel passed two euros a litre for the first time on Tuesday: €2.012, to be precise, while petrol is closing in on its record at €1.748. Svoboda found its answer quickly: an extraordinary session of the DZ and a law that would halve oil traders' margins for six months.

"In Svoboda we have decided to help a government that does not know how to cut fuel prices and therefore feels powerless." (translated)

Specifically: in mid-June the government of Janez Janša set the maximum permitted margins for diesel, petrol and heating oil at 11.5 cents per litre. Svoboda would now nearly halve them with an intervention law, to 5.91 cents for diesel, 6.07 cents for 95-octane petrol and 6 cents for heating oil. The government has meanwhile already adopted one measure, removing the biocomponent from the price calculation, but it did not in itself lower prices significantly.

"It is not right that we all pay more so that traders can earn more. […] That is why, in our firm belief, we must act as soon as possible and also support our bill at an extraordinary session of the DZ." (translated)

The Chamber of Commerce has already called the proposal destructive for the economy, the expected reaction from the industry that would lose most from the measure. Svoboda, meanwhile, does not have a majority to pass the law through the DZ on its own, and the extraordinary session is above all a chance to publicly remind the government, which by its own account only "inherited" the margins when it took office, who left them like that. As a political gesture the proposal is flawless; as a law that will be adopted, it will probably end up where opposition proposals that the coalition does not need end up.