Writing about elections in North Macedonia, whether presidential, parliamentary or intra-party, is a real nightmare for any critical and coherent writer.
Your articles will be published the next day. During that time, all Macedonian television and internet portals, even before the final results are known, will have already been announced and chewed over the elections! Then the author has to be quite creative and inject some postmodern wit into his text!
This happened with the elections for the chairman of the Social Democratic Union /SDSM/, which recently disastrously lost the parliamentary elections in North Macedonia. Election day was marked by their intra-party byzantine games, the top news and topic of the day on all televisions. The four candidates for president of the party all the time accused each other of electoral violations, and one of them - Slavyanka Petrovska, withdrew her candidacy the previous day. Jovan Despotovski and Aleksandar Baidevski came forward with mutual accusations of data misuse. In the end, Mr. Venko Filipche was elected chairman of the SDSM with 9,052 votes.
In his statement after the election result, he stated that the party must be "reformed and reorganized". Filipche emphasized that the SDSM will be a party that "unites, not divides". A party that will be a "bright example for the young generations" in North Macedonia!
This is a familiar rope-dancing, keeping the balance of the absurd. The same rhetorical form, apologizing for mistakes and promising a new beginning, was observed by VMRO-DPMNE after the failure of the parliamentary elections in 2016.
The speeches of both parties resemble short rhyming songs for which only irony, grotesqueness and satire would be the form in which they could be commented upon. Cyclical changes bringing the situation to absurdity and then promises of a bright future are the main weapons of the two largest Macedonian political parties playing ping-pong with the TV electorate.
For them, the nation is a concept of a monolithic unit that expresses the general will. Losing the power of democratic delegation, citizens do not act but are asked to play the role of the people.
And the Macedonian people, the majority, play this role well. United around ethno-nationalism, they stubbornly go against patriotism and think that if they are ethno-nationalists, then they are patriots. When ethno-nationalism is at the centre of attention, the meaning of the concept of the state, which in its essence is an organized system that functions by the citizens for the citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation, is also lost.
This whole nationalist narrative is supported by media propaganda, which includes various intellectuals, academics, scientists, writers, conspiracy theorists, journalists and ordinary people. The greater the divide according to ethno-nationalism, the greater the circulation of both print and digital media, which have long been under the sway of politics and finance. Politicians, as a rule, are influenced by ratings, to study public opinion in detail and consistently and with the help of citizens' emotions to increase their rating. The public sector is ostensibly influenced by these programs, but indirectly by personal benefits.
Today it is obvious that the two parties help each other, united around ethno-nationalism, or rather anti-Bulgarianism, with mutual consent, in which one side plays the role of the good and the other - the bad policeman. Mutual accusations of traitor and patriot are just a decoration of the absurd, and the same people have been cyclically handing over power for decades. At least if this division was more useful and tolerant - without such negative emotions that hovered among the majority of people, without hatred, bitterness and pre-heart attack rage, then everyone would spend their time on smarter and useful things.
Sometimes the voice of reason also appears, in the person of the American ambassador to North Macedonia Angela Ageler, who in the past days without diplomatic gloves stated that the Prespa Agreement and the Negotiating Framework with the European Union and the Treaty with Bulgaria are the only possible path for North Macedonia to the bloc. At the same time, Mr. Ali Ahmeti, as a representative of the "European Front" from the Albanian opposition bloc, expressed the position that the constitutional changes should be made as soon as possible.
But all that seems to have been lost in the ether. No one can say where North Macedonia is going.
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Eli Sekulovska, a human rights activist in North Macedonia. The analysis is written specifically for
BGNES Agency
BGNES
