1 While Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski is in America, talking about the frustrations of Macedonian citizens with the EU’s hypocrisy, First Deputy Prime Minister Izet Mexhiti is only adding to those frustrations back home. At a party rally in Shuto Orizari, he promised that his Democratic Movement party would hire 2,000 to 3,000 Albanians in the state and public administration, more than the previous Albanian parties managed to do in two terms.
Instead of saying, “we will create conditions for opening factories where thousands of Albanians will work,” he says “we will create jobs in the administrations.” He even goes on to explain that “this will eliminate one problem, ensuring people don’t move abroad and don’t see their prospects elsewhere.”
Take a look at the remarkable prospects the Deputy Prime Minister is offering his voters. The chance for their greatest achievement to be joining a party and securing a state salary. Even if they do, I’m not convinced they won’t still move abroad. We’ve had cases where, as taxpayers, we paid administrators salaries to feed their families back home, while they took up temporary work abroad on the side.
Mexhiti’s coalition partner, Minister of Public Administration Goran Minchev, describes the deputy prime minister’s statement as a “classic example of pre-election populism” and urges him “not to behave like Alice in Wonderland, promising something that is not realistic.”
Mexhiti isn’t the one in Wonderland. We’re all in Wonderland if we kid ourselves that what he’s promising won’t happen. Employment in state administration is the one thing that parties actually deliver on. Especially when they’re in power.
2 It’s nice that Mickoski talks about the unprincipled and hypocritical policy of the European Union towards Macedonia’s European integration process at every appearance abroad. That being said, I’m not sure how important that narrative is to the new American administration under Donald Trump. It doesn’t seem to work back home either. All it does is fuel Euroscepticism a little more by poking fun at them: Hey EU, look what Trump is doing to you. See how it feels when someone plays games with you, just like you’ve been doing to us for 20 years?
You want to join the elite club, sit at the table with him? Not happening, there are more important stakeholders. You’ll have to wait.
However, poking fun at people doesn’t improve your life. The admiration here for Trump’s behaviour towards the once-trusted American allies and partners in the EU reflects immature and childish thinking that won’t improve our livelihoods. It’s clear. Even after eight months of a change in government, our topics are either changing the coat of arms or promises of new party jobs, while the prime minister blames the opposition, Bulgaria, and the European Union for everything, literally everything, from supermarket prices to judges and prosecutors. That will be the case until the local elections in the autumn. And then, until the next elections.
3 Ukraine, under attack by Russia, is desperately offering five hundred billion dollars of national resources in exchange for some form of security guarantees. Where does Macedonia stand, alone, without the EU, in the face of these dramatic global changes? What do we have to offer the corporate interests driving the business logic of the major powers, aside from our natural resources, which we’ve already destroyed, so we’d become a landfill for their waste? The only difference is that, until now, we’ve offered ourselves to foreign capitalists as cheap labour force, and from now, as slaves to the techno-feudalists.
But even that won’t save us if a Trump, whether this one or another one in the new order being shaped, wakes up one day and gets the wild idea to post on social media: Is that really a country, is it just a neighbourhood, we’ll divide that land, half to Albania, half to Bulgaria, they’re bigger, they have the sea, they’ll give us the ports, these guys have nothing. Does that sound scary? Well, it certainly sounded scary to Ukrainians, and although they’re much bigger and wealthier than us, they’re in a situation where officials from Washington are sending them messages suggesting Ukraine may not be Ukraine tomorrow. To make things worse, they made it seem as though Ukrainians were to blame for Russia attacking them. And, on top of that, they suggested that Ukrainians were to blame for fighting for three years to liberate their occupied territories.
4 Speaking at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council in Washington, Prime Minister Mickoski stated that “first we have to change the mentality of prosecutors and judges, to judge and to decide according to the legislation and Constitution, not according to the politicians’ request, which previously selected them.”
I’m almost embarrassed to ask, but I think to myself, since politicians aren’t ashamed of anything, why not ask the question one more time. What happened to the deputy director of a public enterprise who was photographed, rifle in hand, next to a killed bear, for whom the prosecutor’s office initiated a preliminary investigation?
How’s the investigation progressing? Has the man been dismissed? Not that I have anything personal against him, not am I particularly fond of bears, but I was provoked by the Prime Minister’s speech in the USA, where he said that the mentality of prosecutors should change, so that they don’t follow the requests of politicians.
Some time ago, I wrote that we’re probably the only country in the world where the government is trying to cover up the killing of a bear. But if you listen carefully to the Prime Minister, it seems the opposition is the one actually trying to protect the deputy director appointed by the government.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
