the economist
Macedonia's fractious politics
Business as usual in Macedonia
Feb 24th 2011 SKOPJE from the print edition
WANT an election? Fine. Since last month Macedonia’s opposition Social Democrats, boycotting parliament, have wanted an early poll. So imagine their surprise when Nikola Gruevski, the populist prime minister, agreed. His calculation is simple: he will win. The Social Democrats have been caught off balance. The conditions are not right for an early poll, they are suddenly saying; there should be no election before June.
Macedonian politics has been poisonous recently. In November police piled into the building that housed A1 television, a private channel often critical of Mr Gruevski’s government. A month later they arrested Velija Ramkovski, the tycoon behind A1. This is not about media freedom, says a source close to the government: Mr Ramkovski simply never pays taxes.
The affair is extremely murky. Lists have emerged that purport to detail the salary and tax affairs of A1 journalists, including payments made in cash. But Slagjana Taseva, head of the Macedonian branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, says many people in the private sector are paid like this. The decision to single out A1 shows that the affair is actually about “suppressing the media”.
Who emerges from this mess strongest? Macedonian opinion polls are unreliable, but they suggest that Mr Gruevski is far more popular than Branko Crvenkovski, his opposition counterpart. Unemployment is high and the name dispute with Greece is still unresolved, stalling Macedonia’s progress on joining NATO and the EU. You would expect such problems to favour the opposition. But Mr Crvenkovski has been prime minister twice and president once. He was unable to solve them then and today he looks tired.
To complicate matters, Macedonian politics is a game of three-dimensional chess. A quarter of the population are ethnic Albanians, almost all of them Muslim, who vote for their own parties. Mr Gruevski’s coalition partner is Ali Ahmeti’s Democratic Union for Integration. Suad Missini, an analyst, says Mr Ahmeti has been hurt by allegations (which he denies) that he was once an informer for Serbian intelligence.
Tensions between Macedonia’s ethnic groups recently flared up over the construction of a church-shaped museum in Skopje’s old fortress, which Albanians are unhappy about. The government said it would suspend construction. Builders sneaked in overnight to continue the works, followed by Albanians attempting to demolish it. Ten years after Mr Ahmeti’s guerrillas almost tipped the country into war, no one wants a renewed conflict. But the problems will not go away.
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