1 Each session of the Judicial Council resembles an episode of a soap opera and there’s more and more suspense, and it’s very likely that once this season is over we’ll continue watching the adventures of the main characters in the next season as well. The series titled “All roads lead to the Judicial Council” seems never-ending. The characters in that show are judges who face petitions for dismissal, and in the very next episode, said judges become members of the Judicial Council.
Three candidates have applied for the positions of the two members of the Judicial Council who resigned. In the same Judicial Council, one of them is facing an initiative for dismissal. As for the other candidate, the Judicial Council received a letter from prosecutors with evidence of an injured party in a case that he led.
But that’s not all. In this episode, a third character emerges – a female member of the Judicial Council who has shelved a case against one of the judges long enough for said judge to become a member of the Judicial Council. In the same episode, she joined the Viber meeting, but when the next item on the agenda was the dismissal of a judge who had shelved the case against Mijalkov for the mass wiretapping long enough for its statute of limitations to expire, her Viber crashed and closed. They tried calling her on her phone, a regular phone call, but they were out of luck as she had lost her network connection. It happened exactly during that item on the agenda. No Internet, no phone, a dead line, the subscriber is not available. Hello, hello… and finally, hey, you fool!
That’s right. We, who believe they’d be ashamed of what they’re doing, are fools. They have a thick skin when it comes to shame. If this were happening in a real soap opera, you’d think, wow, the scriptwriter went too far with this story. But this is not a movie. Having no shame is their natural predisposition to be in that place.
We keep wondering why they’re not ashamed of what the Dutch ambassador or the Austrian ambassador said. They’re not ashamed of us, the ones who are paying them, and we expect them to be ashamed of foreign taxpayers. Shame on us for expecting them to be ashamed.
2 The greatest defeat for SDSM is when, during question time sessions at the Assembly, MPs of VMRO-DPMNE ask Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski why he doesn’t act against DUI and when they threaten that once they come to power they’ll arrest the criminals of the current government.
Isn’t this Ali Ahmeti, whose nephew is now buying shopping malls all over Skopje at the age of 25, the same Ali Ahmeti who helped Gruevski rule: How far we’ve come, VMRO is now accusing others of crime. How low has SDSM stooped!? The party that, for 11 years, used DUI’s help to rob the country, to capture state institutions, illegally wiretapped thousands of citizens and at the end stormed the Parliament and never apologised for it, is now threatening SDSM that once they come to power they’ll arrest them.
On top of that, Artan Grubi appears on television and in the context of Ramiz Merko being put on the US blacklist for corruption says: “The Anti-Corruption Commission is no good. They haven’t had a single successful case and I hope the next composition will be more successful”.
That’s not cynicism. This is exactly the situation when you’re wondering why the interlocutor isn’t ashamed of what they’re saying, while they’re looking you in the eye and say: Hey, you fool!
The same way the Government takes us for fools when it says that “the institutions should act in the case of the mayor of Struga, Ramiz Merko, and Ali Ahmeti’s nephew, Driton”.
Which institutions? It’s all a mess, maternal uncles, fraternal uncles, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law… Some are in the Judicial Council, some in the Supreme Court, some in the Prosecutor’s Office, some in the Academy of Judges, some of them are entrepreneurs; some of them have business ideas… You have no idea is someone is someone’s brother or if someone’s mother is also someone’s sister there… The only thing we do know is they popped out of the party notebooks into those institutions.
3 It doesn’t matter at all what the topic for the protest organised by the Church was. As they protested against gender equality and laws on civil registry, they could’ve protested against planting peppers and tomatoes. What does matter is that we now have a social climate where a religious institution is given legitimacy in a secular state to debate who may and may not have rights in a democratic country. In doing so, the clergy propagates intolerance and hatred.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were happening at a time with VMRO-DPMNE in power. However, this is happening during the rule of a left-wing coalition. First, they allowed the church to consolidate state-owned plots of land to build residential buildings and sell apartments. Now, they’re even playing politics, and priests are telling us how to live in a secular country. Priests and imams will be drafting our laws. Why don’t they change our Constitution as well? A left-wing government turned the church into a political heavyweight.
Since they’ve been in power, SDSM have been giving their all to disappoint all those who helped them topple Gruevski in those terrible conditions in 2016. Those are the people who believed in progress, justice and the liberation of the state from the parties and that SDSM would make sure that “that evil will never happen again”. And after they failed to deliver a single offer of good governance, the only thing left for them to do was to offer us faith in God. Their offer has been reduced to god-fearing leftism. Why? Pure populism. They’re adamant about repelling potential voters in an effort to win over all those who’d never vote from them in their right mind.
The worst is that they’re endangering the foundations of the secular state.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
