The parliament in Skopje - © stoyanh/Shutterstock
With the election of a technical and guarantee government, new parliamentary elections will be held in North Macedonia next May. The next parliament will have the difficult task to review the Constitution to relaunch the country's European path
In 2024 significant political changes are expected in North Macedonia: the process began on January 28, when the Parliament in Skopje elected a new transitional-technical government. The newly elected “technical” ministries will be in office for 100 days until the new parliamentary elections scheduled for May 8.
Since 2016, to put an end to the political crisis that started in 2015, the political forces in the country have agreed to elect a technical transitional government 100 days before the regular parliamentary elections, representing both the previous government and the opposition, in order to ensure fair and democratic elections.
Back in 2016, the then opposition of the SDSM organised mass protests after denouncing that the VMRO-DPMNE government had spied and unlawfully recorded political dissidents, pointing to evidence of abuse of power.
The current government, which was led by SDSM, left the place of prime minister to the DUI party, which eventually fulfilled its promise to bring the country an Albanian prime minister. The current Speaker of the Assembly, Talat Xhaferi, will lead the government until the May elections.
The opposition VMRO DPMNE did not vote for and did not accept Xhaferi as Prime Minister, although the party participates with several ministers and deputy ministers in the new technical government.
"It is not fair for the party that has fewer MPs, as well as the party that is associated with the largest number of corruption scandals, to receive the prime minister's position”, explained Antonio Miloshoski, MP from VMRO DPMNE. “SDSM and LPD, the faithful partners of DUI, today made the Macedonian people tenants in their own country and staged a humiliating dualisation of the country”. Miloshoski then added that the proposed ministers from the ranks of VMRO-DPMNE will monitor the ministers from the ruling coalition.
DUI leader Ali Ahmeti pointed out that the election of Xhaferi is historic for both Albanians and Macedonians, as well as for everyone else, because it enabled an equal state and society and overcame all existing ethnic prejudices.
The May elections themselves are the result of a political agreement, as they were scheduled for July. The agreement was reached in December 2023 among the political parties that are now represented in parliament.
The compromise agreement followed the 2023 failure by the current parliament to secure a two-thirds majority in order to change the Constitution and include Bulgarians as an official minority, which is a condition posed by Sofia to allow North Macedonia to start its EU membership negotiations.
Ruling SDSM and DUI assured that they would receive the support of several deputies from VMRO DPMNE to pass the controversial constitutional reform with 81 votes out of 120 deputies majority, but this never happened.
After the agreement for new elections was reached, then Prime MinisterDimitar Kovacevski said that eventually, after 17 years of political turmoil, regular parliamentary elections are going to be held in North Macedonia. The last regular elections for the composition of the parliament were held back in 2006.
“This means that the government managed to create additional stability, certainty and predictability. It is a big step after the existence of a captive state until just less than a decade ago", Kovacevski said at the time.
In 2023 Hristijan Mickoski, leader of VMRO DPMNE, demanded that there be no technical government one hundred days before elections, but asked for immediate elections instead.
Disagreements among political parties arose when Bulgaria invoked its veto right to block North Macedonia's EU bid since 2020: according to Sofia, the Macedonian language is simply Bulgarian by another name, while North Macedonia does not recognise its common cultural and historical ties with Bulgaria.
At the same time, Sofia demands that a Bulgarian minority be officially included in the Constitution of North Macedonia. The proposal that came from France in June 2023 – during Paris’ EU presidency – offered a series of measures to overcome the current stalemate, measures that were accepted by the Macedonian government, while the opposition rejected them firmly.
The parliamentary elections in May 2024 will also coincide with the regular presidential elections: the first round to elect a new head of state will be on April 24, and on May 8 there will be a second round of both elections.
These will be the 11th parliamentary and the eighth presidential elections since the country's independence in 1991. The technical government led by Xhaferi will be the third one elected to manage the electoral process. The previous two were headed by Emil Dimitriev from VMRO DPMNE in 2016 and Oliver Spasovski from SDSM in 2020.
The newly elected technical government has twenty ministries including the Prime Minister. Since Talat Xhaferi left the position, Jovan Mitreski from SDSM will be new president of the Parliament until May.
Talat Xhaferi, born in 1962, went to military academy in Belgrade, then was an officer in the Yugoslav Army for decades, and from 1991 in the Army of Republic of Macedonia (ARM). In 2001, during the armed conflict, he deserted from the ARM and joined the Albanian National Liberation Army and was amnestied after the Ohrid Agreement. In the past he also served also as Minister of Defense.
