Europe Elects, a European wide poll aggregator, sees VMRO-DPMNE winning the early general elections in Macedonia with a comfortable margin over SDSM.

According to Europe Elects, which bases its data on a month old IPIS poll, VMRO would win 42.6 percent of the vote, ahead of SDSM with 36.6 percent. This means that VMRO would win with about 100.000 votes ahead of SDSM, its margin of victory especially high among ethnic Macedonians. This is close to the prediction VMRO leader Hristijan Mickoski made recently.

Among the ethnic Albanian parties, the SDSM coalition partner DUI has 9.1 percent, while the opposition conservative party Alliance of Albanians has 5.7 percent. Alliance’s likely partner BESA polls at 1.4 percent.

The poll covered 1.109 citizens, and was conducted between 14 and 19 September, a month ahead of the loss of the expected EU accession talks date, which was a major humiliation for Zoran Zaev and his SDSM party. Opening EU accession talks was the main goal for Zaev, and he presented it as the reward for the imposed name change of the country. The total failure of this approach at the European Council last week is expected to be have effect that will be measured in the next polls.