VMRO-DPMNE official Dragan Kovacki, who will lead the party’s list in the eastern 3rd electoral district, said that the main issue the voters have raised with him is the high emigration level.

The 3rd district is one of the largest by area, it has 22 municipalities. It is heavily depopulated, largely because of the policies of this Government. We have a complete collapse of our system, lack of trust in the institutions, and that is why the citizens are leaving. With degraded institutions, with non-funcitoning institutions, with officials focused only on corruption, the people see all that and pack up and leave. It is not just the young, we see well-off people who are leaving. They see the lack of order, the lack of justice, precisely the issues this Government promised to uphold. Farmers, retirees, all are in the streets protesting, Kovacki said.

Polls show that this will be one of the areas where VMRO-DPMNE will build up its advantage in seats in Parliament over SDSM. During a press conference, Colonel Kovacki tried to outline the main corruption scandals of the DUI – SDSM Government, noting that it is difficult as they come every other day.

As the biggest security related scandal, I would point out the issuing of a Macedonian citizenship to the Russian spy Onyshchenko, where a number of NATO countries issues statements. This will obviously be noted in our future relations with NATO. I would also point out the issuing of 215 passports to high level criminals from bribed our institutions, while, at the same time, our own citizens can’t obtain passports and are locked in their own country. One of the main security related scandals was the blacklisting of the Macedonian company Cytrox, which was developing an illegal wiretapping software. This was pointed out by our strategic partner, the United States, but our technical Prime Minister Talat Xhaferi claimed that national security is perhaps not fully the responsbility of the Government – a total lack of understandign of the issues, Kovacki said.