– Macedonia’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections
Comment by Sasha Uzunov, Editor Alternate Comms
Without getting carried away with all the hype, time will tell us where Professor Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova stands on key issues, such as the Bulgarian blackmail of Macedonia for EU entry.
Having said that Professor Siljanovska-Davkova makes history by becoming Macedonia’s first ever female President since independence in 1991. She was elected on May 8, 2024 in the second round of the Macedonian Presidential election. Parliamentary election was also held on the same day.
There will be fierce US pressure placed on her to give in to the Bulgarian demands, and if accepted will place the country on the certain path of partition between a Greater Albanian entity & Bulgaria.
You can bet your bottom dollar the US Ambassador to Macedonia, Ms Angela Aggeler, who wields the real power in Macedonia, will be letting Professor Siljanovska-Davkova know what Washington expects her to do! Again, it remains to be seen if the newly elected President and the government will react to the fierce US pressure.
As Macedonia’s President, her Executive powers are limited to certain roles. Legislative power resides with the government that is formed in the Macedonian Parliament known as the Sobranie (Assembly). It looks like her party VMRO-DPMNE will come to power in some shape or form. Party leader Hristjan Mickovski is poised to claim the Prime Ministership.
Sixty-one seats out of 120 are need to form a government. The convention is a Macedonia party must coalesce with an ethnic Albanian party, all of the Albanian parties are fiercely nationalistic in varying degrees. This involves political horse trading, wheeling and dealing, patronage etc etc. It also involves making “concessions” to Albanian nationalist demands for the price of forming a government.
This mechanism of a ready made Albanian proxy was deliberately installed by the US, making the country dysfunctional, after the 2001 ethnic Albanian war in Macedonia, sponsored by the US in the first place.
It also explains how a right wing Albanian Neo Nazi party DUI, led by Ali Ahmeti, who started the 2001 war, has remained in power by switching allegiances to whichever main Macedonian party comes to power.
Other Albanian parties have sprung up to challenge Ahmeti’s supremacy of the ethnic Albanian vote in Macedonia but their ideological outlook is virtually the same.
The previous VMRO-DPMNE leader who was Macedonia ‘sPrime Minister Nikola Gruevski was taken down in a 2016 US sponsored soft coup on the pretext of “corruption” but in truth removed because he did not change Macedonia’s name quickly enough.
Greece, a staunch US ally, demanded that Macedonia change its name if it were to remove its veto of Macedonia joining both NATO and EU.
Gruevski had been hand picked and groomed by the US as a member of a new generation of business managers and liberal economists that came to the fore in Macedonia post communism and post socialist Yugoslavvia. Gruevski was the US’s man but once his usefulness had expired he was promptly removed via a US financed “Colour Revolution.”
Zoran Zaev of SDSM party, came to power soon after and quickly delivered on the US demand that Macedonia change its name for Greece. Zaev’s government became mired in massive corruption. He resigned over bad local government election results and replaced by Dimitar Kovacevski, who simply followed Zaev’s lead in pandering to Albanian extremists, Bulgarian demands and so forth.
Despite all the hoopla, Gruevski was convicted on a charge of “corruption” over a dodgy car deal & conveniently allowed to “escape” to Hungary by the US, which finds it useful to have him as a purported bogeyman for Russia in Budapest than in jail in Macedonia.
Nikola Gruevski was a US political creation. He was groomed as an economic manager type friendly to Western big businesses. He even amnestied Albanian Neo Nazi Ali Ahmeti, a US proxy, of any war crimes that Ahmeti may have committed in 2001 war even though such an amnesty for war crimes is not valid according to international law.
But that is one example of the political game Macedonian politicians, whether they are centre right VMRO-DPMNE or centre left SDSM, are forced to play by the US, pandering to Albanian extremists as a price for gaining government and keeping power. Corruption has existed within all the major political parties in Macedonia, regardless of ethnic background.
All of these occurrences, in particular Gruevski’s removal by the US, would now be firmly in the mind of current VMRO-DPMNE leader Mickovski as claims or tries to claim government.
Real power resides with the US Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia known by the nickname, the Kale, (the tower, the fortress).
