1 How does offering and accepting bribes work? You don’t know? How could you not know, everyone does. That’s what Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski says. He claimed that someone offered him a bribe to make sure the tender for the railway to Bulgaria went through. While he didn’t say who made the offer and how it was made, he did say: “We know the channels that make these things happen.”
How could we possibly know? Are we all supposed to know because we’re offering bribes or being offered bribes daily? Or is this something only the party leaders and directors of state companies appointed by the party are aware of? If someone doesn’t know, let them reach out to the Prime Minister, who also happens to be an educator, and let him teach us about “the channels that make these things happen.”
The Prosecutor’s Office states they haven’t received any formal report about someone attempting to bribe the Prime Minister. Logically, they should initiate an investigation based on the circulating rumours. And if Mickoski doesn’t cooperate with them, they should prosecute him for obstructing justice. Or they could hold him accountable for making such a statement publicly and then prosecute him for making false claims.
However, since he’s the Prime Minister, he apparently sees no need to report anything to the Prosecutor’s Office. That’s why he says: “I decided to fight crime and corruption publicly, which is why I made that statement and it’s a message that the time for criminals in politics is over.”
As if reporting crime to the Prosecutor’s Office is not public enough. As if that’s not a proper way to fight corruption. He’s planning to fight with statements made at press conferences.
2 I suppose the daily press conferences by VMRO-DPMNE focusing on the tights and the teddy bear bought by former Minister of Culture Bisera Kostadinovska – Stojchevska, are part of the same public fight against corruption. The two parties are competing over what’s more expensive, the dinner and rented apartment in Vienna for the former minister, whose luggage was lost by the airline, or the business class ticket to America for the prime minister, who suffers from knee pain. As if we don’t have institutions who should handle these matters, they take it upon themselves to parade the receipts for quail eggs at their press conferences. They announced that a VMRO director, who was treated the same way by SDSM a few years ago for her quail eggs receipts, has been appointed to office after all. Still your tights are more expensive than our eggs.
When Zoran Zaev was Prime Minister, he also pompously presented a plan to fight corruption. He even created a new position – Deputy Prime Minister for the Fight Against Corruption, and in March 2021, he and Ljupcho Nikolovski held a press conference urging citizens to report corruption, similar to Mickoski’s current plan to establish a special hotline for reporting corruption. Zaev announced that every state institution would have a designated person to handle whistleblower reports. Ljupcho Nikolovski, at the first press conference in September 2020, said that “officials will manage just fine even if they don’t use a company card,” but Mickoski takes it a step further by warning his people that if they steal, they bring shame not only upon him but also upon the organization.
That being said, no, we don’t know how offering and accepting bribes works. What we do know is how the fight against corruption works. The first step is to target the previous government. After that, you might proceed to catch one of your own. Then, you don’t give a damn about it and plunder as much as possible until it’s time for new elections. That’s pretty much how the fight against corruption unfolds in “our” and “your ranks.”
3 Mickoski appears on TV every day, saying things like “we’ll win,” “we’ll get back on our feet,” “we’ll fight,” “look at the situation we’ve inherited,” “we’ll inform you tomorrow, we’ll inform you the day after tomorrow, we’ll make it happen tomorrow, we’ll make it happen the day after tomorrow,” he still feels the “pain and sting of North in front of Macedonia”… He’s still driven by the same momentum that carried him the previous seven years while he was in the opposition.
Who do you need to win against? You’ve already won.
I don’t know how reassuring it is for those who believed you that you’d raise their salaries and voted for you, if you tell them to wait for better times because you found 700 pounds spent on a business card. I don’t know if the ones who cast their vote because they believed in you will be understanding if you blame the unions for being under SDSM’s control. Filipche still can’t take control even in his own party headquarter building, let alone control the trade unions.
When you’re in opposition you can say whatever you want, but once you’re in power, you need to find funds to deliver on your promises. Mickoski is no longer the leader of an opposition party at a pre-election rally, but the president of the Government with a super stable majority in Parliament. And the hundred days of the Government under the coalition of VMRO-DPMNE, VLEN and ZNAM are ticking away relentlessly.
4 As could have been expected, the police are being blamed for the two incidents caused by the President of the Assembly Afrim Gashi.
The shift supervisor is being held responsible for the wedding procession, when, along with the official car, five other cars, some official and some private, crossed the border with Kosovo without registering. Gashi said that “it wasn’t his job to sit in the passport control booth and monitor who passes through.” As for the incident with his security guard, who brandished a gun at the Skopje Airport because the President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, refused to have her personal luggage scanned, he said that he’s not the one who selects the security guards, it’s the Ministry of Internal Affairs that manages that.
He says that the President of Kosovo phoned him with a trembling voice, and he heard children crying in the background, as if she was being held hostage, although she was only supposed to go through routine security screening, so he sent the guy with the cocked gun to rescue her. Allegedly, Gashi was busy, otherwise, he would have gone to rescue her from airport security. If he hadn’t been busy, would he have gone there himself with a cocked gun?
Maybe Afrim Gashi is actually better than Talat Xhaferi, as Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski says. We don’t know what kind of person he is. Maybe he’s nice, hospitable, helpful, patient, modest… But we mustn’t let them take us for fools. You can’t justify the unjustifiable.
We’re playing a mock game of running the state. Both us and Kosovo. And we’re using a story from the Western Balkans. The story featuring a vain president with a trembling voice and frightened children, and a good Assembly speaker who got stuck with a bad police officer.
5 VMRO-DPMNE has nicknamed MP Bisera Kostadinovska – Stojchevska as Bisera Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess and Queen of France who was guillotined in Paris in 1793 during the French Revolution. The phrase “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake” is often attributed to her, although historians disagree whether she actually said it.
VMRO-DPMNE came up with the idea to give former minister Bisera a nickname, because they’re also guided by the logic of Marie Antoinette in their ongoing dispute with the mayor of Skopje, Danela Arsovska. Their suggestion to resolve the problem with the public transport is: If there are no buses, take a taxi.
If someone can’t afford a taxi, they’ll need to wait for better days. Let them use their passion to get where they need to go – on foot.
In the meantime, VMRO-DPMNE could enlist the Ilinden Cavalry from Lisiche to transport he citizens of Skopje from Drachevo to Gjorche Petrov. And from the Clinical Centre to Butel cemetery.
For the next elections, let them offer free public transportation once again. However, finding a less competent manager might be a problem. As for finding voters – no problem at all.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
