
The local elections marked another low for SDSM, which won only 126 thousand votes for its lists of municipal council members. SDSM won only 230 council seats, two and a half times less than VMRO-DPMNE, which convincingly won the elections.
Previous lows for SDSM included the 2006 and 2008 general elections, when the party was led by Vlado Buckovski and Radmila Sekerinska and had over 200,000 votes, as well as the general elections last year, when it won 154,000 votes.
The collapse is made worse by the fact that SDSM fell behind Levica, Albanian parties or independent candidates in the races in Bitola, Karpos, Brvenica, Butel, Kisela Voda, Kumanovo as well as in the highest profile mayoral race in the capital Skopje, where their candidate Kaja Sukova is fourth and could easily have been fifth.