Opposition leader Hristijan Mickoski insisted that holding power is not worth losing lives over, as the ruling SDSM party is pushing for elections to be held before the epidemic is fully defeated.

Elections will be held when conditions are met to hold fair and democratic elections. I don’t want to get the mandate to form the Government if we keep counting victims over it, Mickoski said.

A number of officials of the ruling SDSM party are pushing for elections to be held as soon as possible, although Macedonia is still grappling with the coronavirus epidemic. After SDSM party leader Zoran Zaev, today his deputy Radmila Sekerinska joined in the push for elections, insisting that it is necessary to hold elections as soon as the conditions are met.

I don’t want the country to enter the second possible wave of the epidemic and the second half of the year without a Parliament and without fully functional institutions. That is why we consider elections to be necessary, Sekerinska said.

The Parliament was dissolved in mid February to make way for early elections on April 12, but then the elections were called off because of the epidemic. SDSM tried to recall the Parliament but this was rejected by both vMRO and the DUI party, which held the position of Speaker in the dissolved Parliament. Currently SDSM is hoping that the Constitutional Court will repeat its 2016 precedent and find a minor technicality in the vote to dissolve the Parliament, leading to its recall. The Court willl discuss whether to raise the issue on Wednesday. Mickoski pointed to a previous decision by the Court that it has no mandate to nullify the February decision of the Parliament to dissolve and said that it will be the case on Wednesday as well.

VMRO-DPMNE remains certain that it will defeat SDSM, owing primarily to the rapid drop of the leftist party among ethnic Macedonians. “SDSM is only interested in how to reduce their margin of defeat. The elections will lead to an inevitable defeat for Zoran Zaev and Radmila Sekerinska, who are seen as corrupt and incompetent in their management of the epidemic”, VMRO-DPMNE said in a press release. According to the opposition, SDSM is hoping to push the elections forward, before it is fully safe for voters to go to the polls, hoping for elections to be held sooner rather than later – before the whole extent of the economic crisis is felt in the public.

Healthcare Minister Venko Filipce was asked today about this opinion on holding elections. He said that the vote should happen after the Committee on communicable diseases recommends that it’s safe to vote, under a strict protocol that will include rules for voting.