Navigation for Mickoski

Gjorgi Spasov

Macedonia had the honor, for the first time since its independence, precisely on the day the independence of the state was declared 27 years ago, to receive its first official visit from the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This most powerful woman in the world, from the country where about 50 percent of Macedonia’s total export goes, from a country where over 100.000 Macedonians live and who regularly send money to their families here, from a country that had a key influence on democratic change in Macedonia and the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of Gruevski, and from a country which because of its economic power could only make some concessions from Greece in the conclusion of the Treaty of good neighborliness – came and told us that the support of that agreement does not threaten Macedonian national identity. That the agreement guarantees the opening of Macedonia’s path to EU and NATO membership, and called on citizens not to stay home for any reason on September 30th, but to come out and declare themselves for or against the referendum question: ” Are you for Macedonia’s membership in the EU and NATO and acceptance of the Agreement between Macedonia and Greece? ”

At the press conference with the Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Ms. Merkel was asked what would be the message of the leader of the opposition party in Macedonia, Hristijan Mickoski. She replied that she would tell him the same thing that she told Prime Minister Zaev. On September 30th, it is necessary to come out and vote in the referendum, and Macedonia should not miss this chance for membership in NATO and the EU.

Mickoski was summoned to the German Embassy with Merkel and after the talks, when asked what the Chancellor said to him, he replied: “This was a tête-à-tête meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel. I can not say what we talked about. We will wait for navigation from the members to decide about who our position in relation to the referendum.”

The CDU party of Angela Merkel, which practically brought Gruevski in power in 2006, who supported and through the “Conrad Adenauer” Foundation trained and prepared the party and gave crucial support whenever needed, before every election, publicly asked Mickoski to call the party members to vote and for this sister party in Macedonia to realize that the agreement reached with Greece was invented neither by SDSM nor by DUI, but it’s something much bigger and more important than who is or who will be in power in Macedonia. Mickoski and the new leadership of VMRO-DPMNE was told the same thing by Austrian Prime Minister, Sebastian Kurz, who is also the leader of another sister party.

And after all this, and after Donald Trump congratulating Ivanov for the agreement reached with Greece in his greetings for Independence Day, Mickoski declares: “Next week I will receive navigation from the membership we are currently discussing with.”

Since he has already announced at a rally that the deal is bad and the referendum question is vague and that he does not feel he is the one who should be calling people to vote or not to vote, his final message, navigated or not, appears to be “I don’t know. Decide on your own will. You will come out to vote or you won’t. And I personally do not know what I will do that day.”

Those who are currently navigating Mickovski, seem to suggest a public or quiet boycott of the referendum.

What are the calculations of those who conspire to boycott the referendum?

In the voter list for the referendum, 1.806.336 citizens of Macedonia are registered.

But in no referendum up to now or even at any parliamentary or presidential elections, no matter how dramatic, no more than 1.200.000 citizens came out, or about 66% of the voters registered in the voter list. The approximately 600.000, appearing on the list from 1991 to the present day, have either immigrated from Macedonia or are temporarily working somewhere without a work permit or for various reasons are not interested in politics at all. Hence, those who have never appeared in elections or any decisive event for the country’s fate and future, can not be considered as anyone’s supporters or boycotters of the referendum.

It is therefore important how many of the standard 1 million and 200 hundred thousand voters will go to the polls and how they will vote, and how many of them will stay at home and for various reasons will not vote “for” nor “against”.

VMRO-DPMNE knows that in the elections in 2006 when they won the elections and when Gruevski formed a government, from the then registered 1.779.527 voters in the voter list, only 967.676 voters came out to vote, meaning only 54 percent of those registered in the voters’ list. VMRO-DPMNE with 300.000 votes won in those elections formed a government and shaped the fate of Macedonia in the next 11 years.

In the referendum on independence in 1991, when there was no control over the voting, there were 1.495.907 registered voters, and 1.118.946 of them came out to vote, which is 75% of the registered voters, 1.079.308 of them voted „for“.

At the last presidential elections in 2014 when Ivanov received a second term for president, which were timed with parliamentary elections, of the 1.779.572 registered voters, 967.676 came out to vote, which is 54 percent of the voters, while Ivanov was elected president with 534.910 votes or 30 percent of the registered voters.

In the last parliamentary elections in December 2016, when all parties made every effort to bring their voters to the polls, from 1.784.416 voters, 1.191.854 cast their vote or 67 percent of the registered voters.

In those elections, the coalition of VMRO-DPMNE, that since has significantly weakened, won 454.577 votes. That number of VMRO DPMNE supporters has dropped significantly in the local elections held in April 2017, and after the change in leadership and the political split in that party, after the collapse of the coalition, no one can say with certainty how big is the drop in support for its attitudes and policies now.

Hence, escaping into a boycott of the referendum is Mickoski’s escape from the actual measurement of his support from the electorate.

He does not want a campaign to measure the number of his real supporters and call them to vote against the deal, and that’s what all smaller parties like Levica and some minor newly founded parties are also doing. Their goal is to hide the defeat of their policies in this referendum behind the number of those 600.000 citizens who are registered in the voter list but never appeared in reality and claim that there is some “vast majority” of the citizens of Macedonia who do not support the contract.

The coalition of SDSM, DUI and all other parties, not only of Albanians and Macedonians, as well as all other ethnic communities in Macedonia that now form the Coalition for a European Macedonia, need to prove that of those 1.200.000 voters who are real voters in Macedonia, at least 650 to 700 thousand voters will go to the referendum and will vote “for”. It is a majority larger than the majority that elected Ivanov, larger than the majority of any party that has so far formed a government and a sufficient majority to prove what’s the majority will of the people and what is the direction Macedonia wants to move in.

The navigation that Mickoski is getting so far is wrong. And it is only pushing him into escaping the debate, escaping the campaign, escaping from voting in the referendum, and escaping from counting the support he has from the electorate. Considering that such policies have resulted in losing the support from all Albanian parties in Macedonia, from all key strategic partners of Macedonia in the international community, from all from the neighbors and from the sister parties of the VMRO DPMNE itself, and from the founders of that party, it is clear that with such policies, the party can not expect success in any of the next elections.

Views expressed in this article are personal views of the author and do not represent the editorial policy of Nezavisen Vesnik