1 The mayor of Skopje, Danela Arsovska, speaking from the position of president of the Association of Local Self-Government Units (ZELS) threatened the Government that mayors will become radicalized if the Government doesn’t give them money to pay their municipal electricity bills. How will they become radicalized? They’ll attack the Government? They’ll organize protests and block streets and roads? They won’t collect the rubbish? They’ll shut off our water? They’ll turn off street lights and set stray dogs on us to eat us in the dark? Or in the spirit of successful radical management – they’ll simply not pay for electricity?
However, what really matters is that parking in Skopje will be 25 percent cheaper. And there’ll be free bus transport. Zoran Stavreski, VMRO-DPMNE’s supervisor of the projects of their mayors, used to say – “We’re lunatics. We don’t have enough for bread, while we squander away on chocolate”.
At the end of the day, whatever the manager of the City of Skopje promised in the electoral campaign, it doesn’t apply if there’s a crisis. Let the Government think what to do with the crisis, she has her own projects. Amid a global energy crisis, she reduces the cost of parking and introduces free transport for senior citizens. She finds the mega park much more important than covering the heating costs of the citizens of Skopje. She wants the Government to give her money so she’d carry out her populist projects. So senior citizens would love her, while everyone would hate the Government for their loans. Why? Because the party that supported her in the elections isn’t the Government.
As a manager you have to adapt to the conditions in a crisis situation. If your company is facing a crisis, you try to deal with it, to reduce unnecessary costs, to save money, to look for other sources of funding, to cut jobs. As a manager you’re not supposed to complain on television that everyone’s attacking you and that you don’t have enough money to pay for electricity. Fine, she can complain if she wants to, but she also needs to do something about this crisis. At the moment Danela isn’t acting like someone who was elected by the citizens to solve their problems, but like someone who’ll protest on behalf of the citizens.
It’s easy for Hristijan Mickoski to sit in the white palace, taunt everyone and ask for early elections several times a day, since from that position he has no responsibility to be in charge even of a local community. However, Danela has a capital to run. She’s the one in charge of the budget of Skopje, not Mickoski. And she has specific tasks how to make the city work properly even in times of crisis. Regardless of the fact that the people of Skopje elected her as an independent candidate supported by VMRO-DPMNE, she needs to take Hristijan Mickoski’s ideas with a grain of salt. The way he’s started blocking anything and everything because he’s not in power, we might end up not having public transport at all, let alone free public transport.
2 Between two statements asking for early parliamentary elections, Mickoski asked the Government to give municipalities more money from the state budget and at the same time announced he’d ask for excise tax reduction. Then how will we get enough money for the budget?
He then proceeds to accuse that the “administrator” and “pawn” Kovachevski plunged the country into debt and is taking it in the wrong direction. And his main economic expert Trajko Slaveski is analyzing that we’ll be in debt for several generations ahead. We’re incredibly lucky that when he was Minister of Finance, Gruevski’s government didn’t take such big loans. And even luckier that they spent their money productively, on monuments.
3 For a moment I found it funny that VMRO-DPMNE issued a statement demanding responsibility from the government why there was a power cut at the time when Mickoski was reporting on the work done by VMRO mayors in the first 100 days of rule.
That’s the same party we heard in the information bombs say “cut off the power supply” so a TV show wouldn’t air. It’s the same party whose minister asked the Air Traffic Control to keep the planes in the air and not let them land on time so citizens wouldn’t be able to vote. So, it’s normal for that party’s first reflex to be to think that the government deliberately set a transformer on fire so the lights would go off while Mickoski’s reading their successful results.
4 I can’t realize why there was such uproar that in a closed session, the Government decided to send a 28-year-old TV presenter as Consul General in New York.
And what’s the big deal that the candidate for consul general is a TV presenter? Is it her fault that she considers herself capable of being a consul? She was ambitious, she applied in the party, the party supported her in a Government session, the Government elected her. Why was all that anger directed at her, and not at the Government which elected her in a closed session, violating laws on diplomatic service, and then tried to hide it? Everyone is free to wish for whatever they want.
But, that’s how things stand here. Staring from the lowest echelons of municipal clerks who are paid for basically doing nothing, to directors of public enterprises, schools, kindergartens, theatres, hospitals, and even consuls general and ambassadors. For every three professionals they hire three times more slackers – based on their party, family or sexual background. And we’re the ones who pay the wishes of staff hired by the parties. Here, the administration isn’t under political patronage. It’s a case of classic party administration at state expense.
5 Bulgarian MEP Aleksandar Dzhambaski, famous for his anti-Macedonian views and one of the main supporters of the veto on the start of Macedonia’s EU accession talks, raised his arm and greeted everyone in the European Parliament in Strasbourg with a Nazi salute.
He then justified himself that it wasn’t a Nazi salute, but an innocent wave of the hand.
The MEP included Ohrid in a video for his electoral campaign promising that “Ohrid will become more Bulgarian” stating “Macedonia is Bulgarian, and Bulgaria is above all”.
His innocent waving isn’t a Nazi salute. It’s an administrator’s salute. That’s how the administrators of Macedonia from 1941 to 1943 used to wave like.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
