1 The pre-election campaign has kicked off with parties sowing fear.

SDSM is scaring us that VMRO might return. VMRO is scaring us that SDSM would stay in power. DUI doesn’t see an internal enemy, so it’s scaring us with Russia.

They’re all scaring us with something. Yet, none of them scares us with corruption. Corruption isn’t a topic during the elections. Because in Macedonia, no one’s afraid of corruption. Only America is afraid of corruption raging in Macedonia.

2 When SDSM came into power in 2017, its first move was to eliminate government advertising on television. Almost seven years later, they joined forces with the MPs from VMRO-DPMNE and passed a law that reinstated government advertising on television with money from the state budget. They even fast-tracked it, they voted for it at night, with the use of the European flag, in case they lose the elections, leaving VMRO-DPMNE unable to spend state funds for party propaganda again.

It’s simply unbelievable that at the end of its mandate, the government reinstates VMRO-DPMNE’s most powerful tool – propaganda paid with state funds, which had been grinding us down for 11 years . It’s almost as if the ruling SDSM is its own greatest enemy. You’d think, VMRO-DPMNE must be paying people within SDSM to work against their own interests. And, as the elections draw near, they’re intensifying their efforts to sabotage themselves: “Mickoski, we’ll assist you, have this law, we want to make your governing easier.”

It’s almost as if they enjoyed it when VMRO-DPMNE bashed them on television, when they didn’t let them appear on the news even for a minute, when they beat them inside the Assembly and none of that was broadcasted, when they deliberately didn’t report from Zoran Zaev’s press conferences when he released the “information bombs” with the wiretapped conversations, when the organised attack on the Assembly on 27 April 2017 was described as “the most peaceful attack on the Assembly” and “an unpleasant even,” when in debate shows they stuck nails to their faces, when they covered them with tombstones… Striving to buy love with our money, they’re sucking up to the same owners of the televisions whose power supply they used to cut off. One can’t but wonder how it’s possible to get amnesia after such a traumatic experience, after only seven years.

Let’s consider the notion that people in SDSM don’t even think about the possibility of electoral defeat, because their leader Dimitar Kovachevski is boosting their morale by banging on the podium and shouting “Victory, victory…!” But, even if they do end up winning, what does the reinstatement of government advertising on private televisions imply about their future governance? It implies, the millions are here, let’s now spend them on propaganda, the way VMRO-DPMNE used to do. Let’s repeat the 11 years of evil, which Zaev promised would never happen again.

They’ve gone to great lengths to make it easier for VMRO-DPMNE to come back to power in full glory, cleansed of all the horrid things it inflicted on us. First, they legalised “Skopje 2014” for them. Then they passed a law to reduce the sentences of VMRO officials, allowing the statute of limitations on their crimes to expire so they wouldn’t be prosecuted. They made their life easier, enabling them to concentrate on the party activities to regain power. And finally, they reinstated the law that will enable them to tap into the state budget and to deal the final blow.

You’d think SDSM is apologising to VMRO-DPMNE  for keeping them upset for some time, but now they’re restoring the entire toolkit for governing with impunity. The only thing left for them to do is to apologise to Nikola Gruevski for failing to bring him back as they had planned and let’s close this chapter of our lives – seven years down the drain.

3 God forbid, I don’t even want to think about that, but occasionally it crosses my mind: they’re aware they’re sinking, so much so that they don’t give a damn that they’re causing further damage to the country. Why? What have we, the citizens, done to anger them? It’s not like we are naïve, but we must have been hopelessly desperate to believe that after the systematic 11-year-long destruction and capture of the state by VMRO-DPMNE, someone within SDSM would emerge capable of making a change with new norms and new values. They had the power and the enthusiasm of the citizens, international support, and even had a progressive civic platform for the progress of the state that they simply had to follow. However, that civic platform, demanding vital changes in the exercise of power, was kidnapped and destroyed by SDSM.

Let’s make one thing clear. Let me repeat, for the hundredth time, a point that parties can’t comprehend because they don’t expect people to have an opinion, but obedience. We’re not discussing the expectations of SDSM sympathizers or their fellow party members. We’re talking about citizens who believed that things shouldn’t get worse than they already were. Not that they couldn’t have, but that they shouldn’t .

That’s why, as in every election, this time we should be very careful how we cast the vote we hold in our hands.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski