Zoran Zaev and his SDSM party saw their popular support cut in half, says opposition leader Hristijan Mickoski, who went through their numbers in the last several electoral cycles.

SDSM had 435.000 votes in the 2016 early general elections. They grew their coalition significantly by the time of the 2017 municipal elections, but won only 410.000 votes. And then in 2019, at the presidential elections, SDSM added DUI to their coalition, and won barely 320.000 votes, Mickoski says.

He points to the dramatic drop in support for Zaev’s party as evidence that the Macedonian public rejects his corruption and his foreign policy. Macedonia holds another round of early general elections in April 2020, after the now outgoing Prime Minister Zaev failed to secure the opening of EU accession talks even after the humiliating name change he imposed on the country. Zaev is pushing for another pre – election coalition with DUI in an attempt to fight VMRO-DPMNE to draw similar to the one in the first round of this year’s presidential elections, but DUI is so far noncommittal.