The Central and the Executive Committees of the VMRO-DPMNE party met on Thursday evening and decided to nominate the party leader Hristijan Mickoski as their candidate for Prime Minister in the upcoming elections.

Mickoski was also given authority to negotiate with the other parties on the creation of a technical Government and to appoint VMRO-DPMNE’s candidates in it. VMRO is supposed to name an interim Interior Minister and the ministers and deputy ministers in several other key departments who will make sure that the public administration is not abused even further in favor of the ruling SDSM party during the elections.

Secretary General Igor Janusev also announced that VMRO will not engage in “under the counter” negotiations with the outgoing Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who yesterday calledo n VMRO to accept his proposal to change the electoral model and intorduce a single electoral district in Macedonia instead of the current six. In exchange, Zaev offered to accept VMRO’s proposal for the Spitzenkandidat model – the notion that the candidates for Prime Minister will not seek a seat in Parliament and the defeated candidate would withdraw from politics and not hide behind parliamentary immunity in case of criminal investigations.

Janusev reminded Zaev that the electoral district proposal officially came from several smaller parties, who believe it would help them win seats in Parliament independently, and not from SDSM. According to Janusev, Zaev’s proposal now reveals that it is SDSM who actually stands behind the proposal. It’s believed that SDSM hopes to run several smaller protest parties as their proxies, having them pick up votes from dissatisfied SDSM supporters, and then returning to the SDSM coalition after the elections. The proposal would shave off seats from the major parties, and also from the ethnic Albanian parties who suffer from chronically low voter turnout due to emigration. Still, under the model with six electoral districts, the majority Albanian 6th district guarantees that at least 20 seats would be divided mostly among Albanian parties.

Through a Facebook post, Janusev replied to Zaev that such as serious change in the electoral model would require agreement from all major parties and can’t be done so soon before the elections.