2024-03-04 19:37:21
The deadline for obtaining the civil support necessary according to the law in North Macedonia to participate in the presidential elections expires on March 8, but it is already clear that at least 7 candidates will participate in the presidential race.
In just hours yesterday, after huge queues wound up outside the offices of the State Election Commission in Skopje, the current president of the country, Stevo Pendarovski, supported by the SDSM, and MP Gordana Siljanovska, a professor of constitutional law, who was nominated by VMRO-DPMNE, gathered the required minimum of 10,000 signatures to confirm citizen support for their candidacies. Pendarovski and Siljanovska already have the signatures of at least 30 MPs from both parties, which represents the other legal possibility to nominate a candidate for the president of North Macedonia.
Pendarovski and Siljanovska are considered the favorites in the campaign. The two are expected to reach a runoff on May 8, which already happened in the previous presidential election in 2019, won by Pendarovski.
The verbal attacks between the two parties intensified with the two congresses that VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM respectively held over the weekend. VMRO-DPMNE Chairman Hristijan Mitskoski expressed hope that the citizens of North Macedonia will help Pendarovski leave the country after the elections, recalling a statement by the current president that people are leaving North Macedonia and he himself would live abroad if he were not president . Pendarovski promised to become a member of VMRO-DPMNE, if the opposition party, when it comes to power, convinces Bulgaria to change its constitution in order to include “Macedonians as a national minority” in it.
The other already shaped race is between two doctors nominated by ethnic Albanian political parties in North Macedonia. The opposition Albanian parties nominated neuroscientist Arben Taravari, and the largest party of ethnic Albanians, the Democratic Union for Integration (DSI), nominated the current Minister of Foreign Affairs Bujar Osmani, who is an abdominal surgeon by profession.
The elevation of Taravari’s candidacy changed DSI’s plans to field a consensus candidate together with SDSM, as was the case in the 2019 elections, and that is how Buyar Osmani’s candidacy came about. He was also the first presidential candidate to collect the necessary 10,000 signatures as early as the end of the fourth day of the term. A day later, Arben Taravari did the same.
The idea of Taravari – his party “Alliance for Albanians” to participate in the upcoming dual elections together with the Albanian opposition parties – caused a split in it. Two separate meetings of the Central Council and two separate congresses led to the court in Tetovo deciding whether he or the former party chairman Ziyadin Sela represents “Alliance for Albanians”.
However, from both spectrums of the Albanian parties in North Macedonia, they have the same demand – that the president of the country be elected not in direct elections, but by the parliament, which can only be done with a change in the constitution. Common to both blocs of Albanian parties is the insistence that the changes in the constitution be voted on, with which the Bulgarians will be included in the basic law, which is a condition for the start of negotiations with the EU.
Three more candidates have so far managed to collect the necessary number of signatures to participate in the presidential elections. The mayor of Kumanovo, Maxim Dimitrievski, was nominated by the party he founded last year – ZNAM, but his political biography is related to SDSM. As its representative, he was an MP and won the mayor’s seat in Kumanovo, but due to disagreements with the SDSM leadership, he ran as an independent in the last local elections.
The political career of Stevcho Yakimovski, who was nominated by the GROM party, is connected with the SDSM, but also with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Yakimovski was the Minister of Economy and Labor and Social Policy, he was three times elected mayor of the municipality of Karpoš in Skopje – once nominated by LDP, once by SDSM, and in the last local elections as an independent, supported by GROM. In the interviews he gave after running for office, Yakimovski stated that he had learned from “the best politician – Josip Broz Tito”.
The necessary signatures to participate in the presidential race were also collected by political science teacher Bilyana Vankovska, who is making an attempt to run for president for the second time, this time nominated by the Left. In 2014, she failed to gather the necessary public support as an independent candidate. Vankovska’s program, according to which “some of the embassies will not like it”, includes the country’s withdrawal from NATO. The chairman of VMRO-DPMNE, Hristiyan Mitskoski, accused the candidate of Left, that together with Stevcho Yakimovski of GROM, they have a role to be “the opposition of the opposition” in order to reduce the potential of the candidate of VMRO-DPMNE, Gordana Silyanovska-Davkova.
In a statement yesterday, after giving his signature in support of Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, Mickoski asked Vankowska and Yakimovski whether they would vote for the SDSM candidate Stevo Pendarovski in the second round of the presidential elections.
“Vankovska is in opposition to everyone – from the first to the last,” the candidate of the Left Party wrote on her Facebook profile, and Yakimovski, again via social networks, replied that he was never a puppet and did not accept secondary roles.
Although voters can support with their signatures more than one candidate, the signatures of the remaining candidates for participation in the presidential elections, who submitted documents to the State Election Commission, still cannot come close to the required number.
Tome Nikoloski, who, according to his presentation on social networks, is a businessman and politician remained without a single signature. Already on the first day of the campaign, he announced that he would boycott it after he did not receive a response from the chairman of the State Election Commission, Alexander Daschevski, to the request that signatures could be collected in all municipalities in the country.
According to the law in North Macedonia, citizens must go to one of the 34 offices opened by the State Electoral Commission to support one or more presidential candidates with their signature. Support can also be given to notaries announced by the commission, by place of residence.
Mr. Poposki from Vevcani, a construction worker and farmer, as he introduced himself on his Facebook page, has so far collected 119 signatures. He is seeking support for his candidacy with appeals through social networks. Vevcani is known for his carnival, mocking processes and policies, and on the Facebook page “My Vevcani” joking comments appeared that “their parties have candidates (for president), and Vevcani – Mr.”
Among the candidates with not particularly high support from the citizens – 204 signatures, according to the report of the State Election Commission, is Zorica Tsvetkovska, a representative of the Right party, whose until recently chairman Lupcho Palevski is suspected of a double murder that shook the country at the end of November, and he is awaiting extradition from Turkey, where he was arrested. Tsvetkovska’s program states that if she is elected president, she will launch a referendum initiative to terminate the agreements with Greece and Bulgaria. Tsvetkovska also claims that she would not sign a decree on which the name of the state is North Macedonia.
The first presidential candidate to announce his candidacy, Velo Markovski, will also find it difficult to reach the required number of signatures. By yesterday evening, 1,466 voters had signed up for it. Markovski is a member of VMRO-DPMNE and when he announced his candidacy, he expressed an expectation that he would be supported by the opposition party, and in an interview late last week he said he was disappointed that this did not happen.
Another member of VMRO-DPMNE – Georgi Manaskov, who by yesterday evening had collected 429 signatures, started his campaign with the same call for support. At a press conference on Sunday, Manaskov insisted that the entire procedure for collecting signatures be stopped due to irregularities.
The candidacy of the Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina – lawyer and civil activist Mersiha Smajlovic – has collected 1,596 signatures by Sunday evening.
The deadline for collecting public support for the candidates for the presidency of the Republic of North Macedonia expires at midnight on March 8.