VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski said that his party is close to winning 61 seats in the coming elections – which would allow him to form a Government outright, and to choose a preferred Albanian coalition partner. VMRO is in an intense political fight with the Albanian DUI party, which has accumulated unprecedented levels of power in its coalition with SDSM, even being seen as the senior coalition partner there.

The historic triumph in the local elections is not enough. We need a double triumph in the general and presidential elections. We need 61 seats in the general elections, and we are close, Mickoski said during a visit to Stip yesterday.

VMRO has a large and growing lead over SDSM in the polls, forcing Kovacevski’s party to consider a pre-election coalition with DUI and other Albanian parties, in the hope that it would help them reduce the margin of defeat.

Mickoski said that the voters will be able to tell a difference between the party that built major infrastructure projects, such as the highway between Skopje and Stip, and those currently in power, who can’t complete a much shorter stretch between Skopje and the Kosovo border. “You can tell a difference between those who secured foreign investments in the past and helped domestic companies, leading to the highest ever levels of economic growth in Macedonia, and those who chained us to the bottom and only plunder the country”, Mickoski added.