In an election atmosphere completely different from that of Serbia, the Macedonians elected the president. The candidate of the right-wing VMRO-DPMNE, Gordana Siljanovska Davkova, received the most confidence, who will go to the second round with the current president, Steve Pendarovski.
Opposing political options after counting the votes are in different moods – in VMRO cheerful, in SDSM gloomy. In many respects sharply opposed, in one unique – in a country where the elections were an event of high risk and numerous irregularities, the entire process was carried out in a democratic and fair manner.
“In North Macedonia, the period is divided before and after Przin, before and after 2016. Not only Pribe’s report, but the entire process of negotiations between the then most powerful man in North Macedonia, the now fugitive Nikola Gruevski and the then opposition member Zoran Zaev, now the retired prime minister. It played a big role, but if they had been left to themselves, nothing would have happened. The main role was played by the international factor, the European Union, high representatives of the State Department, who sponsored the agreement that started North Macedonia moving towards democratic elections, which, unfortunately, we did not have before that,” said journalist Dušica Mrđa.
Mrđa, as well as others, remember the period before Pribe’s report and the agreement in Pržin in terms of electoral engineering and say that the elections in Serbia are reminiscent of the Macedonian electoral past.
“Those events were undemocratic. The opposition at that time proved that the elections are only a facade, institutionally stolen by the government itself. The relocation of voters in large numbers was carried out in order to create a political engineering and abuse the will of the citizens,” said political analyst Blagojce Atanasoski.
Conditions then elections, so they say, under the watchful eye of observers, a process began in which the curiosity is that VMRO, in the ruling party that organized unfair elections at the time, made it possible for today, as the opposition, to get the most votes for its candidate.
I follow the elections in Serbia. They also remind me a lot of the past here. I recently said that Serbia reminds me of Macedonia in 2014.
While the Macedonian scenario was mentioned in Serbia, now the Serbian scenario is being discussed here. That, they say, means a certain return, after the democratic changes, to a not-so-democratic past.
