BRUSSELS, Belgium — Ever since they broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, Slovenes have liked to present their country as a sober, Swiss-like Alpine land, nothing like their hot-tempered Balkan and Mediterranean neighbors.

So the wave of speculation that Slovenia is poised to follow Cyprus as the next victim of the euro zone crisis sweeping southern Europe has left them mortified.

“People here are very worried,” says Tanja Fajon, a Slovene member of the European Parliament. “If I look back over the 20 years since independence, the negative atmosphere has never been so bad.”

Slovenia isn’t the only nation worried about contagion from Cyprus. Fears that savers in other countries could follow Cypriots in seeing their bank accounts frozen, access to funds restricted and deposits raided to help bail out banks are spreading across the euro zone and beyond.

“We are not Cyprus” has become a rallying cry for officials from Luxembourg to Latvia, Malta to Israel as governments seek to distance themselves from the Mediterranean island’s mess.

The main fear is an outbreak of depositor panic leading to a run on the banks. That would be bad enough if only small countries with oversized financial sectors were in the line of fire.

But market watchers are also increasingly nervous about Italy, the euro zone’s third-largest economy. Mired deep in recession, the country shows no sign its squabbling politicians can form a government, let alone plot a path to recovery.

Zsolt Darvas, an economist at the Brussels think-tank Bruegel, calls Italy the elephant in the room.

“Markets have been very benign on the political stalemate,” he says. “If investors lose their trust that there will be a strong government capable of keeping the fiscal house in order and implementing reforms that would restart growth in Italy, a capital out-flight could start and then accelerate.”

For the moment, however, Slovenia appears to be the most-likely target of market jitters.

The mountainous country of 2 million was once a European success story. After joining the European Union in 2004, it raced ahead with growth rates over 5 percent. Its citizens enjoyed income levels higher than in some older EU members to the west and in 2007, it became the first former communist country allowed into the euro zone.

The following year, the global financial crisis knocked it off track.

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