Dramatic developments in SDSM ahead of the party elections scheduled for June 30th, where the membership is supposed to elect a new leader.

With former Healthcare Minister Venko Filipce the clear front-runner in the race, due to the open support he’s receiving from Zoran Zaev, other candidates are leaving or warning that the party will split. Former Defense Minister Slavjanka Petrovska, who is one of the two main rival candidates to Filipce, announced that she is withdrawing from the race and asked that the elections are called off and a temporary leadership is appointed to lead the party. Petrovska accused an unnamed faction in the party (clearly Filipce and Zaev) of abusing the process of registration of party members that precedes the vote. She insists that party members were not registering themselves but were being registered by party structures, and accused “candidates of abusing personal information of our members”.

Jovan Despotovski, the other competing candidate who is seen as representative of the Skopje wing of the party, said that he has not seen evidence of Petrovska’s allegations and is unlikely to withdraw from the race, but he acknowledged that the “electoral process is very complex”. He cited statements from factions in Skopje who say that the leadership of the party lost touch with the members. In his support, one of the leaders of SDSM in Skopje, Stefan Bogoev, warned that if the process of reunifying the party is not handled well, it could lead to additional splinter parties like Maksim Dimitrievski’s ZNAM, and the creation of independent lists of candidates during the first major test SDSM will face – the local elections in 2025.

On top of it all, the IRL news site published a report with clear indications of corruption affecting Filipce. According to the report, Filipce did not report a company in Bulgaria which he registered in 2022, and his brother Nikola won a license to set up a solar plant near Dojran along with the brother of Zoran Zaev. IRL informs that the solar plant was built by Koco Angjusev, former Deputy Prime Minister in Zaev’s Government, who was recently put on a US black list for corruption (and intimidating IRL). Filipce’s company in the Bulgarian town of Petric was set up at an address used to set up hundreds of other companies, where Zaev’s relatives also have set up their companies for trading with marijuana oil. Filipce was accused of various corruption scandals during his term in office, which ended shorlty after the disastrous fire at the Tetovo hospital that killed 14 people.