Pre-election boasts from Zoran Zaev and his party officials quickly gave way to apologies and pleas directed to the voters, who gave a stunning rebuke to the SDSM and DUI parties, reducing their 2017 electoral numbers by 200.000 votes.

SDSM presidential candidate was telling his supporters in rallies that “I don’t want to see your faces if we don’t beat Siljanovska by a huge margin”. Now that the margin was reduced to a few thousand votes and under a percentage point, Zaev quickly promised an “operation broom” – removal of unspecified party officials after the elections. An actor supportive of Zaev even handed him a broom at the first post-election rally – symbolizing, in the old socialist style of the party, that the leader is all right but some of his associates need to be swept aside. Zaev also asked the opposition ethnic Albanian candidate Blerim Reka for his 80.000 votes, even though Pendarovski is a joint candidate between SDSM and DUI and Reka’s nomination is specifically meant as a rebuke of DUI.

We need Reka’s votes. We nee them all. We invite him to join us in the concept of unity. Let’s join the concept which brings us shoulder to shoulder with the modern European world, Zaev pleaded.

Even more desperate sounding was Skopje Mayor Petre Silegov. While visiting a huge unregulated dump site near one of Skopje’s poshest hotels which caught fire shortly ahead of the elections and laid bare Silegov’s incompetence, he asked the votes to punish SDSM (in an unspecified way), but to still vote for Pendarovski because by abstaining they would “punish the country”.

The process of determining individual responsibility has already begun in SDSM. Thanks to the citizens for this warning they sent us, after the elections, responsibility will be determined for each individual and the institutions they run. I call on the citizens to go to the polls en masse, and if they are dissatisfied with SDSM’s rule, we should not punish our country and get it back decades and decades ago, said Silegov.

Karpos Mayor Stefan Bogoev joined Silegov, but also disclosed that some in SDSM are still in the denial stage. “The result was not bad. It’s probably a message that we should speed some things up”, Bogoev said.

Pendarovski himself was unprepared to assume some responsibility for failing to reach the number of votes he won during his 2014 presidential race, even with DUI and dozens of smaller parties now lined up behind him. Pendarovski implied that it may have been the fault of the coalition partners, the economy, but not his fault.