Zaev seeks new mandate in hotly-contested election
SKOPJE: North Macedonia’s citizens voted yesterday in an election that would decide whether Premier Zoran Zaev will get a chance to build on his success of bringing the Balkan country into Nato and setting out path to European Union integration.
Mr Zaev triggered the early vote in January by resigning after initially failing to secure a date to start EU accession talks. It’s unclear whether he will now be able to win the ballot and form a ruling coalition. His rivals accuse him of focusing on western integration at the cost of problems back home.
The domestic drama plays out against a backdrop of political turmoil in the Balkans. The war-scarred region thought it had put the worst of the pandemic behind it but a second wave of infections have added to the public anger in this restive state.
Whoever wins will probably need backing from other political forces to form a majority ruling coalition. That makes parties representing ethnic
Albanians, who make up at least a quarter of the population, potential kingmakers. The biggest — the Democratic Union for Integration — has already announced its nomination for an ethnic-Albanian prime minister.
Mr Zaev’s government changed the name of his country to resolve a dispute with Greece and unblock its integration path after decades of deadlock. The landlocked country of 2 million became Nato’s 30th member in March, and the EU published a negotiation framework in July for North Macedonia’s accession.
Yet the opposition nationalist VMRODPMNE party has accused Mr Zaev’s government of corruption, as well as of neglecting economic issues for the sake of success on the international political scene.
The party, whose former leader fled to Hungary to avoid jail for abuse of office, has also accused Mr Zaev’s Social Democrats of failing to tackle Covid-19 despite imposing one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.