1It’s been raining for days, just before the municipal elections. You go out of the house with fresh impressions of the arguments and counter-arguments provided by the mayoral candidates, enchanted by the creative political videos, obsessed with the characters attacking you from the billboards at every intersection and you think to yourself: What’s the thing I need the most on a boring autumn day such as this one to make my life better? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when it’s raining in Macedonia and you have to go to work, to school, to the doctor’s, to a concert… What’s the thing you need the most?

What I need is the space shuttle promised by the parties during the municipal elections. So I’d be able to launch myself to the planet from which they’ve defined the priorities about what’s needed in the municipalities where they are candidates.

Based on the wonders they’ve promised it seems they don’t even live here among us. The promises made by the parties at their rallies and in the advertisements are so incredible that some of the candidates can’t even pretend that they themselves believe in what they’re saying.

Personally, I don’t remember being as lethargic about other elections as I am now. Now and then I find it amusing to watch someone who’s decided to make a clown of themselves in politics and laugh at them, but that too doesn’t change anything. Everything else is just wasted money, wasted time and wasted human capital. I stare aimlessly at the TV and I realize just how wasted our political elites are.

2Because of all that lethargy during the elections, we didn’t notice the news that a German company will invest half a billion euros for the construction of wind farms in Macedonia. That’s the biggest investment in the country since our independence and the biggest investment in the field of energy engineering since the launch of the first unit of REK Bitola in 1982.

But, then again, how can you understand the true magnitude of the German investment in the energy future of Macedonia, compared to the thousands of municipal projects promised by the parties at the rallies to their loyal party membership? What are 500 million euros in German wind turbines compared to all the piss and wind by the party leaders and the mayoral candidates?

The strategic partnership agreement with the Macedonian government will last 45 years. Good for us, at least Germany will be looking after us for the next 45 years. Until then, to honour this opportunity, maybe we’ll at least learn how to level manholes in the streets.

3There’s one more good reason why we failed to see the true magnitude of the German investment in the Macedonian energy sector. That news had strong competition because of the renewed hopes of Prime Minister Zaev and Minister of Foreign Affairs Bujar Osmani that the negotiations with Bulgaria will be restored by the end of October, and by the end of the year we’ll start the accession talks with the EU.

They’re probably basing their optimism on the fact that only 23 candidates have registered for the presidential elections in Bulgaria, which will be held on 14 November. Zaev and Osmani raise our hopes that Bulgaria will lift the veto by focusing on the fact that Bulgaria still doesn’t have a government, so on the 14 November they’ll have the third parliamentary elections in the last 8 months.

4 I’ve never been able to understand the phenomenon of doctors in politics, but in these elections, again, I can’t even begin to understand why so many doctors have run for mayors and are heading the lists of councillors. How many times in their career have they had the chance to face such a professional challenge as working during the pandemic and how do they decide to trade their life-saving expertise to become politicians? Half of the doctors have gone abroad, the rest have gone into politics. You’d think that Faculties of Medicine now include a new specialization – one in political science. So, we’ve got to a point where doctors debate about concrete pavers and the ones laying the pavers preach at us about vaccines and swabs.

We hear doctors talking about roads, wastewater treatment plants and garbage collection, while they take no notice of the hospitals and clinics they work at. Starting from the parking lot and the stairs in front of the building to the operating rooms. The doctors will tell us how to manage the municipal waste, they’ll replace lifts in residential buildings and repair potholes, but at their workplace they don’t mind the holes in the chairs in the dirty waiting rooms, the broken lifts and the run-down operating rooms. Standing on the stage with their fellow party members they promise efficient public transport, and when they return to work they face an ambulance which takes you from one hospital to another, because they don’t know which hospital has enough room to admit you.

Come to think about it, we all saw that they don’t mind that relatives were taking care of the patients in the infectious diseases wards. Why would they mind that, when their party doesn’t mind it.

After all, if they’re so into the activism for better living and working conditions, let them be active in their own work environment, so they could improve the conditions for themselves and the patients. As a voter, how can I trust them that they’ll fix everything that’s wrong in the city or the municipality, when as a patient I don’t see they find it important to fix what’s wrong in their hospitals? They don’t
have to wait for their party to tell them what needs to be fixed and what doesn’t.

Realizing that there’s no life and no career if you’re not connected to a party is depressing.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski