1 I believe the Ministry of Finance hasn’t granted approval for the employment of 26 kindergarten teachers in Kochani for over a month, but it has approved the employment of advisers to directors and air conditioning maintenance workers at Macedonian Navigation (M-NAV), because it assessed that this decision was in the best interest of the citizens. After all, surely, obviously, it must be so, since the Government itself has assured us that “the latest hires at M-NAV were made in line with strictly defined legal procedures and clear criteria for expertise, competence, and professional integrity.”

The air traffic controllers’ union has threatened to go on strike on July 10, calling on the Government to put an end to politically motivated hiring in this wealthy, state-owned joint-stock company. They are demanding that, instead of creating well-paid, made-up job positions, the company should hire new air traffic controllers, engineers, and meteorologists.

Be that as it may, there’s no need to panic. Since the government is confident in the expertise, competence, and professionalism of M-NAV’s newly hired staff, the advisers and air conditioning maintenance workers can simply step in when the air traffic controllers go on holiday. It’s clearly in the public’s best interest for the controllers to be on duty when we, mere mortals, are travelling, but when the government plane takes off, or when official delegations charter flights to sign more historic strategic agreements, the directors’ advisors and Ventilation Command Unit can take their seats in the Control Tower.

So what? Instead of meteorologists, these AC experts will instruct pilots to open a window and check for wind before landing or taking off. And the advisors, drawing on the AC team’s expertise will guide the pilots on which direction to take so they don’t miss the runway. It would go something like this: Cold…cold…warm…warm…cold again…cold…warm…cold…warm again… there, good…warm… waaaarm, waaaaarrrrmmmm…. nailed it. Hooray.

The only thing they’ll need to watch out for is not mixing up metres with feet, or kilometres per hour with knots. But above all, they’ll have to speak English. And that could be a serious challenge for those plucked from the party’s employment notebooks, because the language studio in Plovdiv which used to issue TOEFL certificates to candidates running for office no longer works. Julia flew out of Bulgaria.

2 Just as Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski labelled the assaulted air traffic controllers who protested against party-based hiring at M-NAV in January 2024 as the ones doing the assaulting, he now compares the threshold for signatures to run in an election and the vote threshold required to enter the German Bundestag.

Mickoski says: “In Germany, you need 5 percent to get into the Bundestag, in other countries it’s 3 or 4 percent… We’re delivering the best solutions to meet the needs of citizens, not those of individuals or individual NGOs.”

What Mickoski is claiming, at least now, in the age of Google, can be verified easily. Especially since the people in those civil society organisations he assesses as acceptable or unacceptable, are hardly uneducated, undernourished, or unfamiliar with the world.

Mickoski surely knows that there’s a difference between the number of signatures required for independent candidacies and the number of votes won in elections. And surely the party schools of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung have taught him that the pinnacle of democracy and the best civic interest is to obstruct citizens’ right to nominate their own representatives in elections, all while telling them, from his position as ruling party leader, what their interests truly are.

3 At the end of the day, the Constitutional Court has already ruled that high thresholds for independent candidates aren’t in the interest of citizens.

What would President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova say about this, considering she’s a distinguished and respected professor at the Department of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law of the State University “St.Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje, a former member of the Constitutional Commission in the first composition of the Assembly from 1990 to 1992, and as a UN elections expert, and former vice-president of the group “Independent Experts on Local Self-Government” at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg?

In fact, the President’s doctorate, defended at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana in 1994, at a time when that faculty was a pioneer in the region in civil society research, is precisely on the topic “Local Self-Government – Between Norms and Reality.”

What will the president say when she receives the new Electoral Code for signature, especially given there’s no doubt that SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE will vote for unanimously? Will she once again play the “reality” card, as she did when proposing VMRO-DPMNE official Trajko Slaveski for Governor of the National Bank? I’m afraid that the norms in the tile of her doctorate no longer apply after 31 years, so reality will win again.

4 Before the 2021 local elections, when he was still opposition leader, Prime Minister Mickoski stated that a 1 percent threshold was acceptable for VMRO-DPMNE, and that there should be no threshold at all for independent candidates submitting signatures to run for council or mayor. However, in the elections that autumn, independent candidates went on to win council seats in 33 out of 80 municipalities, as well as in the City of Skopje, securing 56,000 votes and becoming the fourth largest political force. Only SDSM, VMRO-DPMNE, and DUI received more votes.

What VMRO-DPMNE, SDSM, and DUI are now doing with joint forces is simply an expanded, upgraded version of what SDSM had already begun by blocking citizens who aren’t party members from taking part in elections.

You’ll surely remember how Zoran Zaev celebrated in 2016: “We brought down a regime with a pen!” He wouldn’t have brought down the regime, “in a million years,” as he himself might put it, had it not been for civil society organisations and the votes of non-partisan citizens who helped him. And then SDSM began to acting like a regime. They did everything they could to belittle the independent, labelling them VMRO sympathisers, mocking them as “VMRO scum,” and sneering “how is it going, neutral scum”… We all saw how much they cared about the citizens when, at the end of their mandate in March 2024, SDSM under Dimitar Kovachevski, out of spite and vengeance, teamed up with VMRO-DPMNE to amend the Electoral Code and raise the threshold for registering independent candidate lists. And now, even under the new leadership of Venko Filipche, filled with people who’ve spent their lives championing civic activism, they are once again siding with VMRO-DPMNE and preparing to vote for higher quotas, despite the Constitutional Court having already struck the law down.

So, the parties do really care about the interests of the citizens. They don’t want the citizens to struggle, to think about politics, to have an opinion, to get involved after working hours, to go around collecting signatures…If you’re not a party member, you might as well not bother voting at all.

Do you know what the next joint step of VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM will be? They’ll adopt an Electoral Code allowing only party members to vote. They really don’t give a damn about their voters. If you’re a citizen without party affiliation, you simply don’t exist.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski