VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski called on SDSM leader Zoran Zaev to withdraw his proposal for major cuts in the salaries of public sector employees. Mickoski has been urging the Government to adopt a different set of measures for weeks, such as freezing payments of corporate loans for the month of March, which were mostly ignored until Zaev shocked the public with this proposal made yesterday.

We have it now confirmed that the system is rotten and was based on PR exercises. We’ve been through 29 years of challenges, crises, the worst form of privatization in the Balkans, the 2001 war, the global and European debt crisis, and yet through all this time nobody dared to what Zaev is now proposing – to go after the salaries of the workers. Zaev is proposing this plan in order to cover up the incompetence of his Government. The 500 EUR salaries he kept promising are now transformed into 230 EUR, Mickoski said.

He emphasized that the proposal would be an exceptionally serious blow for the living standards of all employees.

Such cuts should begin from the ministers, their deputies, directors and mayors, and not with lumping the workers and the managers in the same basket, Mickoski said.

The opposition leader warned that the move would greatly reduce consumption which will then hit all the economic branches. “It will infect the remaining healthy tissue in our economy”.