A comment made by Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi yesterday, as he urged against the resignation of Zoran Zaev, indicated the main motive behind the push to keep Zaev in office even after his major defeat in the local elections. Grubi said that “only this Government can resolve the dispute with Bulgaria”, strongly implying that no other Prime Minister will be open to accept the demands Bulgaria is imposing on Macedonia as it blocks the Macedonian EU accession talks.
Some of the Bulgarian demands include amending the Constitution so that the Bulgarians are named among the constituent nations. Others include declaring a number of Macedonian heroes and whole chunks of history as Bulgarian, along with a push to declare the Macedonian nation and language as derivative from the Bulgarian.
The concessions he did so far cost Zaev badly in the polls, especially with his own SDSM party, where he faced an open rebellion last year. He tried to overcompensate for this by launching an exceptionally ugly campaign against Danela Arsovska, the VMRO-DPMNE supported mayoral candidate in the key race in Skopje, who he declared a “Bulgarian agent”. This even drew a rebuke from the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, which pointed to Zaev’s rhetoric as outrageous – after waiting for the elections to be over.
It is absolutely unacceptable that hate speech is used as instrument of internal political confrontation. The events of the past weeks and the aggressive rhetoric used in the mayoral campaign in Skopje are an illustration of the imposed atmosphere of hostility and intolerance toward the citizens with Bulgarian identity and toward the Republic of Bulgarian, the Foreign Ministry of Bulgaria said.
Arsovska vainly protested and denied Zaev’s allegations that she has secretly obtained a Bulgarian dual citizenship, but this didn’t stop the Prime Minister and his supporters in the media for going on a frenzied attack over several days, including paid online ads and defacing Arsovska’s billboards. In the end, the campaign backfired and the voters elected Arsovska by a wide margin.
Even one of the most die-hard supporters of Zaev, professor Katerina Kolozova, rebuked him for his campaign. But she attributed it to Zaev’s attempt to appease the supporters of former SDSM party leader Branko Crvenkovski, who called for Zaev’s resignation over his policy toward Bulgaria.
Zaev is a unique phenomenon, and his supporters in the party are few. After he uttered a “heresy”, that Bulgaria is a brotherly, not a fascist country, he awoke Branko Crvenkovski from the dead in SDSM, Kolozova said in an interview with the Bulgarian BGNES agency, dismissing Zaev’s ferocious campaign against Arsovska as mere political pragma or a mistake.
Bulgaria holds its own general and presidential elections in two weeks, and Zaev insisted that he will try to reach agreement with them on the growing historic dispute by the end of the year, once the elections are over. But it’s unclear whether he will even try to resume negotiations after his electoral defeat and announced resignation, as DUI asks him to do.
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