Pushback of the Week, December 21, 2025

Slovenia Protects Cash

In our December 10 story on “The Top Cash Acceptance Laws of 2025,” one of the countries we highlighted was Slovenia, which passed a constitutional amendment to protect cash as legal tender on December 1.

The National Assembly passed the amendment into law in a unanimous cross-partisan vote, though it was not legislators but Slovenian citizens who got the cash ball rolling with a social media campaign and grassroots petition in 2023. The government initially opposed the initiative, stating that it would prefer to defer to the EU, but the 56,000 petition signatures in favor of a constitutional amendment forced legislators’ hand.

Although the Slovenia Times warned on May 23, 2025 that success was “by no means certain” and that “Constitutional amendments take a long time to process,” the amendment was a done deal a mere six months later.

MPs cited a variety of reasons for their support of cash payments as a “fundamental right,” including autonomy, privacy, and reliability during emergencies. The massive power outages in Spain and Portugal in April—which “highlighted the vulnerability of modern payment systems, where tapping and swiping predominate”—may have been fresh on some legislators’ minds.

As an (admittedly self-interested) ATM company likes to point out,

“In any scenario that disrupts the digital flow of money—a catastrophic earthquake paralyzing infrastructure, a severe winter storm knocking out communications or a sophisticated cyberattack freezing digital accounts—the physical banknote, often dismissed as outdated, becomes the ultimate medium of exchange.”

Whatever Slovenian parliamentarians’ reasons, their country’s new constitutional amendment is, according to pleased observers, “a huge step toward protecting not only the use of physical money, but also freedom, security, and sovereignty.”