Purple Ohrid

Kostadin Bogdanov

The color purple is a shade that is obtained by mixing red and blue. Just as the two major parties skillfully mixed during the two rounds of the presidential elections and the mayoral elections in Ohrid. According to people’s general perceptions, the color purple symbolizes nobility, power, luxury, ambition, creativity, pride, independence… But in the case of the purple Ohrid (but also Novo Selo), this mixture of the two primary colors (SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE) symbolized the electoral reality in which the main opposition party was found, and that is the non-party candidate Professor Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova convincingly defeated VMRO-DPMNE at the local level, but VMRO-DPMNE, with its outdated narrative, allowed her a convincing defeat at the state level.
Namely, Professor Siljanovska as a person proved to be a good choice for a presidential candidate of the opposition party, given the new circumstances in which the party found itself after the Prespa Agreement. Her rich resume, above all as an internationally recognized law professor, a hard-working legalist, a moderate liberal, with a fairly strong credibility in the public, and finally a woman, managed to amuse and attract an important number of votes of the so-called “swingers”, non-partisan voters, who, in regular circumstances are obviously not yet ready to recognize a qualitative difference in the narrative of the opposition party from the one two or three years ago and the narrative today. And thus to cast their votes for VMRO-DPMNE in some eventual general elections, or, as in the case with Ohrid and Novo Selo, local elections.
The result showed that Professor Siljanovska as a non-party candidate won in 43 municipalities, including in those two that VMRO-DPMNE lost. The “victory” of the law professor over the candidates of VMRO-DPMNE is particularly considerable in the purple city of Ohrid. The result between the party candidate Mr. Miloshevski and the non-party candidate Mrs. Siljanovska-Davkova showed a difference of 2,500 votes in the two rounds of voting in favor of the law professor. In addition, the fact that the VMRO-DPMNE party candidate for Ohrid, Miloshevski, in the first round of elections, managed to win fewer votes than his party counterpart Tilevski in 2017, who was defeated in the first round of elections by SDSM. The case is similar in the municipality of Novo Selo. It shows that the opposition party, with the current narrative, still hardly reaches the “undecided” voters, and any reflection of the professor’s solid election result on imagined general or local elections creates a false perception and a distorted political image of the forces on the ground. Probably if the local elections in these municipalities were not reflected in reality, and those two on the virtual map would have been colored in red.
Given that VMRO-DPMNE has announced a fierce political fight against the political rival for its dethroning in the next general elections, I will also give a small, personal contribution in achieving this goal, a small pebble in the mosaic on the road to victory. First of all, if we want to change something, and thus get out of the state of absolute opposition (and we want it), we should start first by changing ourselves. By this, above all, I mean changing the daily political narrative and rhetoric of the party, which should be split from the past and focus on the future and emerging circumstances. Rhetoric without hatred, without intra-party and social divisions, without labeling, without exaggerated nationalism with chauvinism. Politics without acting like SDSM in 2014, without occupying two or three seats simultaneously, without constantly going around in circles with no clear position, without “base passions”, without naked populism.
It is high time for VMRO-DPMNE to turn to its own statute, in which the ideology of modern people’s parties is unequivocally outlined, which is fundamentally opposite to the philosophy of populism. The modern people’s parties are committed to real democracy in the society. For modern people’s parties, a political rival is not an anti-state element, nor an element that needs to be destroyed and never be congratulated by any political victory. For modern people’s parties it is quite common and healthy to have different opinions and policies in one society even on the most sensitive topics. Modern people’s parties believe in the institutions of their own country. They believe in the judiciary, believe in the administration, believe in the police, believe in the military, etc. Spreading of hate speech, xenophobia or false superiority is contrary to their political existence. For modern people’s parties, the multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity of a society is an added value for society, a potential with great opportunities. The modern people’s parties deeply believe in the perspectives that enable the integration of the European peoples. For them, the neighbors of their countries are not “enemies” who want to dismember or remove them from the “biblical” pedestal, but on the contrary, they see sincere friends with whom they can share a lot for the sake of their own citizens and the development of their societies.
VMRO-DPMNE must build its own ideology and narrative as a political party on the concept of modern people’s parties. It is the way in which the party should be developed in the future and be recognized in the political arena as a center-right oriented party. Naked populism in the “name of the people” is predestined to guarantee the role of the opposition, especially in these newly emerging circumstances, that is, a new reality, which the party refuses to accept. There is enough time to roll up their sleeves for the next election cycle, to visit municipal and local committees in the most rural areas, in order to ensure that the membership is fed with the actual information and political values ​​inherent in civilized democracies, even at the cost of some of them could fail to find themselves beyond the extreme narratives. Only in this way, VMRO-DPMNE will very soon regain its honor and responsibility to lead the country, thereby integrating these modern values ​​into the entire social system for the prosperity and well-being of every individual in it.