Macedonia govt to emerge next week: Assembly head

SKOPJE: A new Macedonian coalition government comprising Social Democrats and Albanian minority parties will emerge next week, putting an end to a protracted standoff, according to parliamentary speaker Talat Xhaferi.

“I expect to receive in a day or two the programme of this cabinet and then to convene a session of parliament for the coming week,” Xhaferi said in an interview late on Friday.

Macedonia has endured almost two years of protracted and sometimes violent political crisis ahead of the eventual transfer of power to the longtime opposition, which now looks to be imminent.

President Gjorge Ivanov on Wednesday gave the Social Democrats (SDSM) a mandate after they won the support of minority ethnic Albanian parties in a December election.

The conservative president had been refusing to grant the SDSM a mandate, saying national unity would be undermined by the demands of Albanian groups, before recanting after the SDSM secured a majority.

SDSM leader Zoran Zaev saw his party and his allied Albanian parties win 67 of 120 seats in the country of some two million people, which aspires to join both the European Union and Nato.

Macedonia was plunged into crisis in 2015 after Zaev began releasing tapes that appeared to show official and widespread wiretapping, toplevel corruption and other crimes by the government under former prime minister Nikola Gruevski.