1 In the presidential and parliamentary elections on 24 April and 8 May, people will be able to vote with an expired ID card or passport, provided that their validity has expired in the period of nine months before the election day. MPs from all parties joined forces, and without any debate, approved changes to the Electoral Code, according to which, basically it will be possible to vote with an expired document, not because of anything the citizens did, but because the state failed to issue them personal documents on time.
So, they’re essentially saying, you can vote for me, but I don’t have to provide you with a passport or ID card on time. Even though you’ve paid me to do so. You can’t travel, but come and vote for me. They’re saying, we’ve given you the opportunity to participate in the elections with expired documents, so you’d vote for the ones who didn’t provide you with documents.
2 On one hand, citizens are sick and tired of waiting in long queues to have their photos taken for ID cards and passports, but on the other hand, thousands of people voluntarily lined up on an early Sunday morning to wait to support the candidacies of SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE presidential candidates. The party summoned them: get here as fast as you can and show them how strong we are. We’ll count who managed to collect the most signatures the fastest.
What’s the power that will get you out of bed early on a Sunday morning to wait in a queue to sign for you party’s presidential candidate? It’s not like you have to, considering both SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE already have 30 MPs, we’ve already voted for them, so even without the signatures they could’ve nominated Stevo Pendarovski and Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova. Are we expected to believe that citizens were burning with desire and couldn’t wait to sign? As if Pendarovski and Siljanovska-Davkova are fresh faces in the political arena that they could be sold to us as independent candidates.
It is what it is. As long as there are tens of thousands of people willing to stand in queues, knowingly participating in a pompous charade that’s essentially just a party scam, perhaps we don’t even deserve a greater happiness than what those we’ve voted for have granted us – voting with invalid documents.
3 Since we accept the abnormal as normal, perhaps that’s what we truly deserve.
Take, for instance, the recent case with the construction of a 17-story building in Karposh, Skopje, in the immediate vicinity of hospitals and polyclinics. The conservation centre revoked the construction permit decision, the person responsible for the previous permit is under house arrest due to suspected abuse of office, but the building with over 400 apartments is already under construction. The investor has started selling the apartments. The municipality granted him a criminal permit, and now Mayor Stevcho Jakimovski is scaring us that the investor might sue him if he stopped the construction. A classic tactic. Be grateful we only stole from you once, we don’t have to do it twice. Meanwhile, the government is making strategies to annul the permit to give the construction company enough time to lay the foundations. So that the compensation that we eventually pay will be greater.
However, the construction company is not to the one to blame, nor is the buyer of the state land. In fact, those apartments wouldn’t be built if there was no one to buy them. What a beautiful location it is. A military hospital on one side, a private hospital on the other, the city’s ambulance service on the third, a polyclinic on the fourth, and even an institute for tests for cancer patients. And if you’re fortunate enough for your balcony to overlook the petrol station – absolutely mesmerising.
If people are willing to pour thousands of euros for an apartment in such a location, then they don’t even deserve to be treated in an well-organised hospital complex, they don’t deserve an ambulance that would reach them fast, the fire brigade to have unhindered access if their apartment catches fire, they don’t deserve guaranteed parking spaces, nor guaranteed spots for their children in kindergartens, new schools, or a park…
That way, citizens themselves become accomplices in the creation of inhumane conditions, conditions they’ll pay to live in. As a matter of fact, people have their own say in choosing who’ll bully them for their money.
4 Both the government and the opposition are boasting that they have a vision. In the upcoming election campaigns, they will undoubtedly speak about a new clinical centre. Instead of saying, we’re a small country, a poor country, let’s at least complete what we already have, to bring order to it and improve it, they’ll once again lie to us with megalomaniac projects. With the rampant constructions on Vodno they‘ve blocked the only access to the “Mother Teresa” Clinical Centre. The same thugs are now going to destroy the entire neighbourhood around the “8 September” hospital and the possibility of its potential expansion. Whereas the parties from the government and from the opposition, which wholeheartedly participated in this urban assault for personal gains, will now show us some 3D presentations from futuristic clinical centres they plan to build on some meadow on the outskirts of Skopje, just to satisfy the greed for the plots that choked the city’s hospitals.
They speak of a vision, of Europe, of America, they brag about NATO, they mention Russia here and there, China… As if they can’t see we’re drowning in rubbish, as if they can’t see that the public spaces are usurped, that officials steal every chance they get, that no one is the competent authority for anything, that no one is held accountable for anything.
We are a country that doesn’t have a functional post office, without a functional railway, citizens don’t have valid personal documents, but what matters is that there are politicians with a vision.
A vision – to steal.
5 The train from Skopje to Veles, now that the track has been repaired, will be able to move up to 50 kilometres per hour, instead of the previous 20 kilometres per hour. To clarify, this is not a report from 1924. It’s 2024.
We have three fire fighting planes, but two pilots have retired, and can’t be hired because freelance contracts with the state aren’t allowed before elections. The way the visionaries are lecturing us, it’s not far-fetched to be scared we might burn until the elections.
For an entire month, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy have failed to reach an agreement on who’ll prohibit the admission of unvaccinated children to kindergartens amid the declared whooping cough epidemic. But then again, I think to myself, when it comes to the people who, in the third decade of the 21st century, have allowed the resurgence of diseases that were eradicated in the mid-20th century and once deadly in the 19th century, perhaps those 20 kilometres per hour are enough for them as a vision for the future.
The director of the Centre for Crisis Management Centre, Stojanche Angelov, in a podcast for SAKAMDAKAZAM.MK said that there are laws in Macedonia, but “let’s not fool ourselves, this is Macedonia, and you know it. I’m trying to adapt to the harsh reality.”
That’s exactly right. Our life has turned into a constant struggle to adapt to the harsh reality. Every single day, the moment we step outside our homes, we adapt to the harsh reality – to the inefficient public transport, to the construction mafia, obstructed pavements, disorganised public health, rubbish on the pavement and the streets, unsafe roads, illegal landfills in the mountains, illegal parking lots, illegal open sitting areas, pedestrian areas turned into boulevards, beaches turned into restaurants, local cafés turned into discos and night clubs, to seeking justice within local authorities, public institutions, courts… There’s a law for everything, but it doesn’t apply to all. So, here we are, trying to adapt. And we’re already so exhausted of adapting that our criteria for everything have dropped down.
I no longer try to look for a logical explanation for how the abnormal has become normal and why it doesn’t bother us. To phrase it in the manner of a lover: Another night, another criterion down.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
