A bizarre pre-election promise was revealed by people from Aracinovo, the large ethnic Albanian majority village east of the capital Skopje best known as the battleground in the 2001 civil war and for the regional impact of the local crime groups.
Interviewed by TV21, local citizens were resentful about the unmet promises given to them by politicians in exchange for their votes. One of the men said that they were even promised 300 new jobs – as pilots.
Those who are now in power, SDSM, they told us that they will hire 300 people from the village as pilots. That is the biggest lie you could make, to promise young people, who are leaving, asking for visas in foreign embassies, that they will get pilot jobs, said one of the villagers to the dumbfounded TV21 journalist.
The men say the promise in a self-deprecating way, as if angry at themselves that somebody actually believed that such jobs and training will be made available. As the video went viral, many were commenting that the Government could have gone even further and offered astronaut jobs.
Control over the village town hall was long fought between the ruling DUI party, opposition ethnic Albanian parties, but also more recently by the Albanian wing of the SDSM party, which currently holds the mayor’s office. Winning Aracinovo is seen as an issue of pride among ethnic Albanian parties in Macedonia and the fierce competition made politicians pull all stops as to what promises they make. Other tactics were also employed, such as detaining a crew from TV21 by allies of the Mayor Milkije Halimi, elected as part of the Albanian wing of SDSM.
Some of the more realistic promises given to the people of Aracinovo is leniency toward paying taxes – which is ironic given that the name to the village comes from the Turkish word for tax.
Other crazy promises shared by Albanians living in Aracinovo include the one made by Prime Minister Zoran Zaev that he will turn Aracinovo into Dubai, giving six million EUR in investments, expanding the sewage lines and building schools and public ambulances, reported the Ina news site.
SDSM and DUI eventually lost the village to the opposition parties BESA and AA in the 2019 presidential elections with a margin approaching 2:1, before the Albanian voters eventually turned to support the SDSM and DUI candidate Stevo Pendarovski almost unanimously in the second round.
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