Macedonia heads for snap polls

Macedonian legislators have ignored warnings from MEPs that early elections would threaten the country’s EU accession, deciding to dissolve the Parliament and hold polls on 1 June 2008.

The small country’s government has been deadlocked for several months now over plans for reform and rights for the the country’s ethnic Albanian minority. But the political crisis escalated last week following Greece’s veto of the country’s NATO bid at the Alliance’s summit in Bucharest (EURACTIV 04/04/08). 

On Saturday (12 April), a narrow majority of Macedonian legislators backed a move by the main Albanian opposition party, the Democratic Union of Integration (DUI), to dissolve the parliament and hold early elections. 

Seventy members out of a total of 120 backed the proposal, among them the MPs from the centre-right parties in the ruling coalition (VMRO-DPMNE) and the Democratic Party of Albanians. The opposition Social Democrats (SDSM) and the Liberal Democrats opposed the snap elections and left the assembly in protest. 

Macedonia’s prime minister and leader of VMRO-DPMNE Nikola Gruevski explained that by holding early elections he wanted to secure a stronger mandate for his next term. 

But MEPs had warned against the move. “If the crisis leads to the dissolution of Parliament it will be almost impossible to make sure that the benchmarks set by the European Commission have been met. This would make it difficult for the Council to set a date by the end of this year for the opening of [accession] negotiations,” warned Jan Marinus Wiersma and Hannes Swoboda, vice-presidents of the EP’s 215-strong Socialist Group, in a written statement. 

“A government crisis would also mean that negotiations with Greece on resolving the dispute over the name of the country would also be held up,” they added. Athens insists that its neighbour changes its name as Macedonia is also the name of Greece’s northernmost province.

Ljubisa Georgievski, the speaker of the parliament in Skopje, dismissed the warnings, saying that the early polls would not create any setbacks. 

Nevertheless, the European Parliament last week had to postpone a vote on Macedonia’s progress report towards EU accession due to Greek MEPs’ insistence that a sentence declaring that Athens should not block Macedonia’s accession to international organisations be deleted. 

During the debate, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn called on political forces in Greece to concentrate on reform rather the name dispute with Greece. 

According to the Greek daily Ta Nea, the probable re-election of Gruevski would be the worst choice for Athens. Greece generally prefers the SDSM party due to closer business and family ties, the newspaper states. 

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