Macedonia holds crucial elections Sunday

29/05/2008

Nikola Gruevski, the incumbent prime minister, is also likely to head Macedonia's next government. Surveys suggest his centre-right party is the front-runner in Sunday's parliamentary elections.

(DPA, Reuters, Makfax - 28/05/08; Balkan Insights -- 26/05/08 - 28/05/08; Angus Reid Global Monitor)

Supporters of the joint opposition Sun Coalition for Europe wave national, party and EU flags at a rally in Skopje. [Tomislav Georgiev]

Macedonia's centre-right party VMRO-DPMNE is widely expected to win the early parliamentary elections on Sunday (June 1st) and lead the next coalition government.

According to a survey by the Institute for Democracy, a Macedonian NGO, ahead of the poll, outgoing Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's party could garner 31.3% of the vote. The main opposition Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia (SDSM) is expected to place a distant second: only 11.2% of the respondents in the survey which was conducted last week, said they would vote for Radmila Sekerinska's party.

As for the two main parties representing Macedonia's 25% ethnic Albanian minority, Menduh Thaci's Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) is likely to be defeated by its main rival, Ali Ahmeti's Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). According to last week's poll, DUI could win 9.1% of the vote, taking a more than 3% lead over the DPA.

Thaci's party was part of Gruevski's coalition government, which collapsed in April following months of friction and only days after Greece blocked an invitation for Macedonia to join NATO, over the two countries' 17-year-long name dispute.

DUI, which was part of the SDSM-led coalition government from 2002 until the previous parliamentary elections in July 2006, indicated on Wednesday that it would be ready to join the next cabinet. The party that gets the most support from ethnic Albanian voters should represent the community in the next government, Ahmeti said.

Commenting on a recent statement by Gruevski, who is expected to lead the next Macedonian government, that he would rather partner again with the DPA, the DUI leader warned that such a move would only set the stage for more political turmoil.

"Regardless of wishes, regardless of preferences, we will honour the will of the majority voters, otherwise, we are drawing up contingency plan that will bring the country into deep political crisis, same as the one in 2006," Macedonian daily Makfax quoted Ahmeti as saying.

In the run-up to Sunday's election, VMRO-DPMNE formed an alliance with 18 smaller parties under the slogan "Macedonia knows, Macedonia carries on". The SDSM leads a coalition, including seven other small parties, under the slogan "A Sun for European Macedonia".

An analyst with the Institute for Democracy says Macedonia is likely to see "new big coalitions".

"Voters would accept it if it's said to be in the interest of Macedonia's stability and progress towards membership of EU and NATO, a goal shared by all big blocs, (ethnic) Macedonian and Albanian," Gorast Stojmenovski told the DPA.

Both the VMRO-DPMNE and the SDSM, as well as the two main ethnic Albanian parties, support their country's speedy Euro-Atlantic integration.

"We want this country to become a NATO and EU member, we have no dilemma and no alternative," a Reuters report Wednesday quoted Gruevski as saying in an interview.

Around 1.7 million people registered to vote in Sunday's election for the 120-seat parliament. Only 40% of the 1,100 respondents in last week's survey, however, said they would participate in the poll, down from the 56% turnout in the 2006 elections. A series of violent incidents have marred the campaign this year.