English
In a nervous press conference, SDSM President Venko Filipce tried to show that he still has control over his group in Parliament, amid a massive split with top former SDSM officials, and launched on tirades and insults against them and Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski. Filipce was able to line up a little more than half of his group in Parliament behind him, as his rivals, Igor Ivanovski and Andrej Petrov said that most of the MPs have already sided with them.
Filipce particularly insulted one member of Parliament, former Defense Minister Slavjanka Petrovska, who has already openly sided with with Ivanovski’s faction that calls itself 12.05, to indicate that its way past time to remove Filipce and try to save the party from further electoral defeats. Filipce insinuated that Petrovska was involved in a corrupt deal involving the purchase of military helicopters and that this was used to pressure her to turn against him.
Filipce, who belongs to the Zaev wing of the party, also threatened Ivanovski and the other 12.05ers that he will “run them over like a steamroller over a frog”. This is a comment former party leader Branko Crvenkovski famously used in one of the early elections. It’s believed that Crvenkovski is supporting the removal of the Zaev faction from the party – Ivanovski was once his top associate. Filipce accused Ivanovski of taking money from being on multiple managing boards of public companies while SDSM was in power, and of giving bad advice that led to SDSM’s downfall.
Furthermore, Filipche assessed that the current leadership had spent the past two years working to consolidate the party, whereas the critics, in his view, were now proposing solutions for its future. “We have all been working hard and consolidating over the past two years, and now they are going to tell us how things should be done? Who is telling us? The very people linked to the government’s biggest scandals?” Filipce stated.
Filipche also insulted Prime Minister Mickoski calling him a “total idiot”. The comment was in connection to the media reports that Macedonia might be left out of the latest plan of EU enlargement that would be guided under different, likely more relaxed rules. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is due in Macedonia tomorrow.