Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani, who comes from the ruling DUI party, rebuffed calls from VMRO-DPMNE to abolish the principle of a technical Government that would be put in place before the elections. VMRO made this offer, which would leave them without the planned control of several important ministries for the 100 days before the election, insisting that for them it’s more important to block the other part of the plan – to have DUI appoint a Prime Minister.

There is no room to alter the model of having a technical Government. We are too close to the elections to change the rules of the game now, Osmani said. DUI invested a lot of political capital in the agreement with SDSM to have an ethnic Albanian named as interim Prime Minister in the technical Government, and doesn’t want to back down now, but VMRO insists that a party as corrupt as DUI has no business naming the head of Government, even on an interim basis.

The procedure itself is simple – it only takes 61 votes in Parliament to change the law and it could be done in days. This morning, VMRO repeated the calls, saying that “DUI is the most criminalized structure in the country – there is no official from this party who is not involved in corruption. It would be a shame for the country to have an interim Prime Minister appointed from their ranks”.