Who brought down the regime?

Robert Nesimi

1. A year and a half after parliamentary elections 2016 it is becoming irritating to hear important political actors pretending that they do not really understand what happened in those elections. VMRO, for example, continues to pretend that it won a majority and is unjustly in opposition. DUI also continues to pretend that it was an absolute winner in the Albanian bloc and that it has the exclusive right to speak for Albanians, since it ostensibly won a majority of their votes. SDSM too has become a part of these same illusions, as it has long ago forgotten that it lost the elections. Trying to justify its coalition it is even lending its support to DUI when it claims that it had no alternative since DUI represents the will of Albanians, as the Prime Minister himself said during his last interview. In the midst of all these pretensions and views, the truth about who really brought down the regime is easily lost.

To answer this question we have to go back to the election results that speak of an entirely different reality. They immediately toss down all pretensions about absolute legitimacy of SDSM among Macedonians and DUI among Albanians. Of course they now prefer to frame this issue within a civil society concept, where there are no split legitimacies, contrary to the yesteryear principle of winner-with-winner. However, the math is now disputable even here, since this coalition does not even have a “civil” majority, ever since the Alliance left the government. The naked truth that the numbers show says that the regime was not brought down by SDSM-DUI (after all, DUI was part of that same regime), but by Albanian voters who voted for Alliance, Besa and SDSM. Let us now see what those numbers say in more detail.

2. The regime lost in elections. VMRO claims to the contrary, the regime did not win in elections. It is true that the partners VMRO-DUI won 61 mandates together, but that is the result of a capricious electoral system that counts mandates in 6 separate electoral zones, thus causing the loss of a large number of votes. The true political legitimacy, that of citizens and their pure votes, was that of a change. VMRO and DUI together got around 535.000 votes, while the opposition got around 611.000. Thus the voice of elections was 53%-47% for change.

3. The new government had legitimacy. VMRO’s other pretension was that the new government did not represent the majority and the election of a new Speaker of Parliament and new government was not legitimate. In reality the new coalition had double legitimacy. First, it had 62 seats in Parliament. The coalition SDSM-DUI-Alliance and two other blocks that joined them also had 590.000 votes versus 555.000 for the parties that remained in opposition. Thus the government had the support of 52% of voters, while the new opposition only had 48%.

4. The government lost its legitimacy when the Alliance left. While we are on the subject, the government lost its legitimacy when the Alliance left it. It now has only 48% of voters, while 52% are in opposition. So when it parted ways with the party that was key to bringing down the regime and whose leader almost lost his life trying to secure a majority, the government lost its political legitimacy together with the moral one. The rhetoric of change and one society for all certainly lost all its luster when the Alliance left.

5. SDSM did not win with Macedonians, they voted for the regime. Since SDSM loves to speak of the voters’ will for change, and it even interprets the will of Albanians, it is necessary to remember that it did not win in elections. VMRO got around 450.000 votes, while by discounting Albanians who voted for SDSM, all Macedonian parties together got around 440.000. This means that in the Macedonian bloc the will of voters was 51%-49% for the regime. It is clear that with Albanian votes out of the picture, VMRO would still be in power.

6. DUI did not win with Albanians, they voted against the regime. The result among Albanian voters was completely the opposite. DUI got only 86.000 votes, while around 165.000 Albanians voted for other options, including SDSM. So Albanians voted 66%-34%, or almost 2-1, to bring down the regime.

7. So how did the regime fall? It is clear that SDSM in 2016 was unable to bring down VMRO by itself. Without the 40.000 votes from Albanians it was not even close to VMRO, and its defeat would have been much deeper. The Albanian political bloc meanwhile was in a totally different mood. It was against the regime, and they managed to bring it down since the opposition parties got a lot more votes than DUI. Albanians even voted for SDSM for the first time in history, in order to bring it closer and even it out with VMRO.
The behaviour of Albanian parties was in the same vein. They perfectly understood the message and mood of voters, and Albanian opposition parties immediately ruled out the possibility of coalition with VMRO. DUI needed more time, but faced with public pressure as well as the wishes of most of its base, it had no other alternative than to part ways with its longtime partner in power.

Political conditions and the electoral system made it possible to bring down one part of the regime and dictated a government coalition between SDSM and DUI, even though the will of the Macedonian and Albanian electorates were diametrically opposite. Today one may want to tell other stories so they can justify weird coalitions, but the cold reality is that told by the numbers. The regime fell because of those 40.000 Albanian voters who voted for SDSM, as well as the new parties Alliance and Besa, that refused to even talk with VMRO when the new government was being formed.