Therefore, one of the key points of interest for the public is how much the VMRO-DPMNE party has changed in the past seven years under Mickoski’s leadership and how much it has distanced itself from the past behavior. In fact, this was one of the questions that Mickoski was asked in his first TV interview one day after the election - “whether some of the bad practices regarding democracy would be repeated”.
In an early summer day after a stormy night on 24th of June 2024, Hristijan Mickoski, the leader of North Macedonia’s right wing VMRO-DPMNE party, entered the government building on Ilindenska street no.2 in Skopje, to assume the office of Prime Minister. This follows his party’s superb election victory seven weeks before, when it got nearly three times as many votes as the incumbent Social-democratic Union of Macedonia – SDSM, (436 to 154 thousand votes) and more than three times as many Parliament seats (58 to 18 in the 120-seated National Assembly). The party also won the presidential race, as its candidate Gordana Siljanovska Davkova got twice as many votes as President Stevo Pendarovski, who was running for a second term, supported by SDSM.
This is the sixth time in the country’s 34-year history of pluralism that the government changes hands between the coalitions led by the two major parties – SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE. But never before has an opposition swept away a ruling party so powerfully, to almost turn it into a minor political voice, on par with the third-positioned coalition by the number of Parliament seats won. And this victory was achieved by a party that in its previous tenure (2006-2017) seriously undermined the democratic standards and the rule of law.
For the defeated social-democrats, the post-election period passed in recovering from the initial shock and preparing for the future, under new leadership. For the winning VMRO-DPMNE side, it passed in reorganizing the government structure by adding four ministries and reshuffling six others, assembling the new government coalition with two other partners, and renewing confrontations with neighboring Greece over the name Macedonia. This can directly affect the prospect of joining the European Union, because Greece was blocking the country’s accession to NATO and the EU for years, until the Prespa Agreement was reached in 2018 and what was once Republic of Macedonia was renamed to Republic of North Macedonia, to make a distinction from the Greek geographic and historical region of Macedonia. But after six years of normalized relations, the friction is back following the refusal of Mickoski and the new President Siljanovska Davkova to use the name of North Macedonia in official oral communication, even in the oath that the President took. Greece quickly threatened that the country’s EU path would remain closed if the agreement is not respected, but that didn’t seem to disturb the VMRO-DPMNE leadership too much. The party is for a longer time skeptic over the conditions for accession set by the EU in the negotiation framework. Only in the last few days the ruling party softened its positions on the Prespa Agreement, but its future behavior is still unpredictable.
The new situation brings many questions that the people of North Macedonia are waiting for the answers to. How will the new right wing government behave in a global environment where the rightist ideologies are gaining momentum? What will its priorities be? How will it handle the relations with the neighbors that affect the EU accession – not only Greece, but Bulgaria also? How will its policies affect the inter-ethnic relations in a multi-ethnic society with complicated relationships between the communities? How will the political scene dominated by the same two parties for decades change if the social-democrats fail to recover from the defeat? The early development provides some hints, but it will take time for the final answers.
No clear promise for abandoning authoritarian practices
Hristijan Mickoski crossed the doorstep into Ilindenska 2 exactly seven years and 24 days after his VMRO-DPMNE party had to exit the same building, ending its 11-year rule characterized by state capture, suppression of media freedoms and civil liberties and deterioration of the rule of law – all of which was registered by relevant international organizations such as Reporters without Borders, Freedom House, GRECO, even by the European Commission in some of its progress reports on the country’s largely stagnant EU accession process. The final years of the past VMRO-DPMNE tenure were also marked by a mass surveillance scandal, indications of rampant corruption, civil protests, heavy political crisis and a violent attempt to prevent the transition of power which culminated in a bloody incident on 27th of April 2017, when party supporters and other protesters stormed the Parliament building, assaulting and injuring several opposition MPs that were about to formalize their new majority and appoint Talat Xhaferi for Speaker of the Assembly.
It was not Mickoski on top of the party when these unfortunate events were taking place. It was Nikola Gruevski, who built a personality cult around himself while in power, but received several prison sentences for abuse of authority afterwards. Instead of serving his sentences, he fled the country and received political asylum in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Mickoski was not on bad terms with Gruevski and even though he was rarely mentioning him, he wasn’t distancing himself from his legacy either. The former leader remained popular among party members, many of whom saw the charges against him as politically motivated. All that changed in 2023, when Mickoski accused his predecessor in an interview for German WAZ of plotting against him and secretly collaborating with the government. However, many of the people that were in the close circle around Gruevski back then, are now in Mickoski’s circle – some have government positions and others still have significant influence.
Therefore, one of the key points of interest for the public is how much the VMRO-DPMNE party has changed in the past seven years under Mickoski’s leadership and how much it has distanced itself from the past behavior. In fact, this was one of the questions that Mickoski was asked in his first TV interview one day after the election - “whether some of the bad practices regarding democracy would be repeated”.
“Just because SDSM says that [there were bad practices], doesn’t mean the citizens feel the same way or that it’s true”, he answered, pointing out to the fact that SDSM was citing international reports from that period in its fear-mongering campaign against VMRO-DPMNE, but disregarding the fact that those reports were prepared by relevant institutions. Therefore Mickoski made no clear promise that the authoritarian practices would be left behind and that the democratic standards would be better respected this time.
Not the best start with transparency
The bombshell information that Mickoski dropped in the same interview was the announcement that he already agreed a direct loan of one billion euros from a foreign government. He also announced new foreign investments in the first 100 days of his tenure, one of which would be 500 million euros in the energy sector.
For seven weeks he left the public and the media speculate where this loan and these investments would come from, refusing to reveal any details on these deals. There is no answer on either how he made those deals before the elections, or how he was negotiating them in the state’s name without holding any public office. The name of the investor – Alcazar Energy Holdings, was revealed in a ceremony two days after the government took office, while the source of the loan is still puzzling the public.
The lack of transparency, particularly regarding public finance, spending, public debt and state aid to foreign investment, was also one of the characteristics of the former VMRO-DPMNE government. A lot of information about how millions of euros of citizens’ money were spent became available only after the change of government in 2017.
How the elections produced a very different political reality
For the past three decades the rivalry between SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE was dominating the political landscape in the country. Even when there were huge differences between them (60 to 33 Parliament seats in favor of SDSM in 2002, 63 to 27 seats in favor of VMRO-DPMNE in 2008), they were clearly the two biggest parties in the Parliament. In the past couple of terms the difference was only two to four seats. There are clear ideological differences between them – SDSM is more liberal, progressive and more cooperative with the global West, while VMRO-DPMNE is more conservative and nationalist. They address two different types of voters, so when one party loses support, it usually means that its voters have abstained, not that they’ve switched sides.
North Macedonia is a multi-ethnic society with the Macedonians making more than half of the population, the Albanians making one quarter, and several other communities filling the rest. The Albanians always had a separate and competitive political scene with at least two parties or coalitions put against each other. These parties are not very different ideologically, as all of them focus mostly on the Albanian ethnic agendas. In the past 22 years in the Albanian part of the political scene, the Democratic Union for Integration (a party that emerged from a paramilitary group that fought against the Macedonian security forces in the 2001 insurgency) won all the elections, but the competition was never too far away. It is accustomed, although not always respected, that the party which would win the majority of the Albanian votes would participate in the government coalition.
There are also a lot of minor parties from the entire political spectrum, and parties of the minor ethnic communities. Sometimes they participate in elections on their own, but more often they join the coalitions of the bigger parties.
Therefore, in the past decades the National Assembly was mostly made of two ‘Macedonian’ and two ‘Albanian’ coalitions – one of each in power and in opposition, and occasionally a few members of some minor parties that would pass the threshold. This was the core structure of the political scene – two by two parties balancing each other.
The past election result threw SDSM off that balance. VMRO-DPMNE’s coalition has 58 seats, SDSM is second with only 18. The parties of the Albanians come in third and fourth – DUI’s European Front with 18 and the VLEN coalition with 14. Levica – a leftist-nationalist and pro-Russian party won 6 seats, and the remaining six seats are occupied by the ZNAM movement – a centrist party participating in elections for the first time, made mostly of people that left SDSM for disagreeing with its policies or its leaders. The government majority is made of VMRO-DPMNE, VLEN and ZNAM (78 seats). So now the right wing, represented by VMRO-DPMNE, has no real counterbalance.
This downfall of the social-democrats was one of the key topics discussed by political analysts in the past weeks. Many reasons were mentioned that could’ve contributed to this catastrophic result. One of them was their failure to impose rule of law and fight corruption. Even worse – they were making political deals with people charged for corruption, and had their own corruption scandals. They even changed the Criminal Code overnight to allow former corrupt actors to pass with lighter sentences or without sentences, which broke their key election promise of holding everyone that broke the law to account, and getting the stolen money back into the budget.
The second reason often mentioned were the concessions to their junior government partner DUI. The former government majority was very narrow, barely over 60 votes in the Parliament, so SDSM was completely dependent on DUI to remain in power. This party is unpopular among the ethnic Macedonians for its paramilitary past. However, it took good advantage of its government position to urge the social-democrats to appoint ethnic Albanians in key state positions (some of which were members of the former paramilitary) and to advance business interests of family members and friends of the party’s leading figures. This went so much out of hand that led the opposition (VMRO-DPMNE) claim that DUI has full power in the country and SDSM are their servants. That’s why VMRO-DPMNE put a lot of emphasis on fighting against DUI in the election campaign and refused to make a coalition with this party after the elections, despite it winning most of the ethnic votes.
Probably the biggest flaw of SDSM was how it handled, or failed to handle, the EU accession. And this is not an issue that only concerns the party, but the entire country’s future.
The EU accession – a long and frustrating path to a dead end
For decades the Macedonian citizens lived with the frustration that the country’s path to membership to NATO and the EU was halted not because of the incompliance with the general rules and standards of these two international organizations, but because of special conditions set by its neighbors that are already members, concerning very sensitive issues such as the identity of the Macedonian people.
Until recently the biggest obstacle was Greece, which since 1991 demanded that the “Republic of Macedonia” (as the country used to be called) changes its name and “stops stealing Greek history”. Greece claims the heritage of the ancient Kingdom of Macedon, the land of Alexander the Great, and also has a big region in the north called Macedonia, so it demanded from the northern neighbor to make a distinction. It blocked the country’s accession to NATO in 2008 and the opening of the accession talks with the EU in 2009, which largely contributed to a nationalist radicalization of Macedonia under the former Prime Minister Gruevski, and to the so-called process of “antiquization”, where the Macedonian government claimed the heritage of Ancient Macedonia, erecting statues of Alexander the Great and other figures of that period, renaming places, and filling the media and public space with the narrative that the Macedonians are direct descendants of the ancient kingdom.
A difficult issue was finally resolved in 2018 with the Prespa Agreement reached between the former prime ministers Alexis Tsipras and Zoran Zaev. The basis of the agreement was that the Republic of Macedonia would take the name of North Macedonia (as it only occupies the northern third of the Macedonia region). The two sides also agreed that North Macedonia will no longer claim the heritage of Ancient Macedonia, and that the Macedonian national identity would mean different things in the two countries. It was a very difficult compromise that was experienced by the right wing part of the population as high treason, but the moderate people accepted it with hopes that at least the country would no longer have to deal with identity politics.
But the story was not over. Bulgaria also contests the Macedonian national identity. The Bulgarian narrative, shared by historians and politicians from that country for decades, is that what is known today as the Macedonian nation is actually people of Bulgarian descent that have been assimilated by the Yugoslav communist regime after 1944. The notion of the Macedonians being a ‘fake’ nation is something that most of them find highly insulting. But despite having these claims, Bulgaria was supportive of the Macedonian state’s EU and NATO accession. However, in 2020, when all other obstacles were overcome, it was Bulgaria that vetoed the beginning of the accession talks between North Macedonia and the EU, over unresolved differences in the historical narratives. These differences included, among other things, how the Macedonian nation evolved, whether the Macedonian language is a real language or a Bulgarian dialect, and how the Bulgarian presence on the neighbor’s territory during World War 2 would be called. North Macedonia’s historiography calls it occupation (or even fascist occupation as the Bulgarian state was on the side of the Axis), but in Bulgaria the event is referred to as unification.
Getting in deeper problems with every next step
In 2017 the prime ministers of the two countries – Zoran Zaev (then SDSM leader) and Boyko Borissov, signed an agreement that envisaged the formation of a commission that would address the differences in the historical narratives. However, the commission did not achieve any results, which led to the Bulgarian veto in 2020.
This was the turning point when SDSM started massively losing support, as it became clear that the party cannot deliver EU accession, and even worse – instead of getting the country rid of identity politics on its way to the Euro-Atlantic integration, it got it stuck with a much more difficult identity issue than the one it had with Greece. Many people felt that the name was changed for nothing, as the NATO membership was not perceived as adequate compensation for the compromise. Polls started showing rise of euro-skepticism, with the support for EU membership dropping to about 50 percent.
There were a lot of efforts from EU countries to facilitate a solution and in 2022 Bulgaria changed its demands. Instead of demanding full implementation of the 2017 agreement to approve the start of the EU accession talks, it agreed that it would be implemented by the end of the accession process, but imposed another condition for the opening – that North Macedonia changes its constitution and adds the Bulgarians as an official minority. There are several ethnic communities mentioned in the preamble of the constitution – Albanians, Turks, Roma, Serbs, Vlachs and Bosniaks. There has never been an official demand from a local Bulgarian community to be recognized, and it came straight from Sofia.
Just over 3.500 people have declared themselves Bulgarian in the country’s 2021 census. However, Sofia claims that there are tens or hundreds of thousands, pointing out to the holders of dual citizenship – Macedonian and Bulgarian. After Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007, a large number of Macedonians declared Bulgarian ancestry in order to become eligible for Bulgarian passports and find work in Western European EU member-states. Many of them didn’t feel like Bulgarians, but made a declaration just so they could get out of poverty. The exact number of dual citizens is not known, but they are way more than 3.500. Sofia uses this information to argue that the Bulgarians are still oppressed in North Macedonia and afraid to declare their real identity.
Ethnic divisions over the EU accession framework
One thing led to another and in 2022 the EU finally prepared and adopted a negotiation framework for North Macedonia, which included, among other things, changing the constitution and recognizing the Bulgarian minority before opening the first negotiation chapters, and resolving the rest of the issues between the two countries until the end of the accession process. This was rejected by the then opposition VMRO-DPMNE and other parties like Levica, who claimed that the framework hides a lot of traps that Bulgaria could later on use to fulfill its maximum demands. The Parliament accepted the framework in the summer of 2022 amid huge and occasionally violent protests from the opposition. However, since the SDSM-led government was way too short of having a two-third majority in the Parliament to change the constitution (80 votes are needed and they barely reached 70), the accession talks never began. It only cost SDSM to become even less popular and lose more voters.
To make things more complicated, the EU negotiation framework became another point of division between the political parties. The parties of the Albanians are in favor of it and demand for the constitutional changes to be made as soon as possible, so the accession talks could begin. As the identity issues in the Macedonian-Bulgarian dispute do not concern the Albanians, many Macedonians see the Albanian positions as unfair and unjust.
In the so-called Macedonian bloc, Levica is completely against the framework, while the government partners VMRO-DPMNE and ZNAM insist that the EU should change it. In fact, VMRO-DPMNE has been holding this position for a long time, even before the elections, making the change of the framework an election promise, despite hearing directly from several representatives of the EU and member-states, including Bulgaria, that no changes are possible. Both the EU and the USA are continuously calling the party to accept the negotiation framework, change the constitution and start the accession process, calling it a matter of strategic importance. However, Mickoski refuses to accept what he calls “the Bulgarian dictate” and said he’d rather focus on the economy and domestic reform than continuing the EU accession under those conditions. He went even further – instead of closing the problem with Bulgaria, he reopened the issue with Greece and took North Macedonia in a bigger risk of not starting the negotiations. Until now, his coalition partner ZNAM was following his footsteps on this.
It’s too early to assume whether the country is risking international isolation if the new government fails to continue the EU accession process. Its Western allies, except maybe Hungary and Orban, would certainly not welcome this. However, whatever happens, VMRO-DPMNE will always be able to count on the support of Hungary and Orban.
The stagnation may have broader implications at home. SDSM now remains the only ‘Macedonian’ party that supports the EU accession unconditionally. Nevertheless, this party is in the middle of a reform and consolidation process after the disastrous defeat, which should determine whether it would be able to continue being a relevant political power. Multiple currents and inner divisions put it at risk of further weakening. If it fails to recover, then the political scene could develop into a situation where the pro-EU vs euro-skeptic divide would overlap the ethnic divide. Such a development could have unforeseen consequences for the country.