May 18 (SeeNews) - Sooner or later Macedonian voters will have to choose between staying loyal to the national interests the way they are defined by the ruling VMRO-DPMNE, and freedom, democracy and justice, as offered by the Social-Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), a local analyst commented.
Macedonia has been locked in a political crisis since January 2015 when opposition SDSM leader Zoran Zaev accused the coalition government of the conservative VMRO-DPMNE and the ethnic Albanians' DUI of corruption and wiretapping illegally thousands of people. For its part, the government charged Zaev with trying to destabilise the country. In a bid to break the political deadlock the main political parties, with the mediation of the EU, reached a deal to hold early elections in April 2016. The polls were then postponed for June 5. The SDSM, DUI and the Democratic Party of Albanians, however, are boycotting the elections as they believes the requirements for a fair and credible vote are not in place.
Two political elites are mercilessly fighting for power in tiny Macedonia, wedging a propaganda war through news portals, television channels and celebrity journalists, Konstantin Petrovski, an analyst of post-Yugoslav societies and a freelance journalist, told SeeNews in a recent interview by email.
On one side is the new political elite led by the former prime minister Nikola Gruevski, and on the other are those centred around the so called “colourful revolution”, or the old political aristocracy, represented by the SDSM.
The latter group includes the ideological successors of the First ASNOM meeting of 1944 - the Communist founding fathers of the Macedonian republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - as well as left-leaning young people organised into a small party and several political movements, he added.
In that context, Gruevski is not lying when he says that people are on his side, the analyst commented.
“Yes, those are the people, which are firmly convinced that the government is accountable for their existence, the people, kissing the hand of the local VMRO-DPMNE boss, asking for a smaller or a bigger favour, usually in the form of employment in the public sector,” he went on to say.
"VMRO-DPMNE, contrary to its supposed Christian-Democratic orientation, traditionally represents the Macedonian lumpenproletariat," Petrovski commented.
Gruevski, after more than ten cloudy years – the so called Kiro Gligorov era - brought some foreign investments in the local economy and strengthened the culture of patriotism, which seems very much unnecessary since it is a natural part of the development of any newly formed country. During its decade long rule, through government subventions for agriculture, the party established close ties with the “peasantry”, where it already had a solid political base, the analyst added.
In his view, Gruevski is totally capable of a brutal crackdown on his political opponents and filling the state administration with party cadres. "The system of student's and pensioner's benefits and lottery-like employment in the state apparatus very much reminds of the Tito-ism, which most of Macedonians, even those born after the 1990, view as the lost paradise,” Petrovski also said.