VMRO-DPMNE Vice President Timco Mucunski said that the 2008 agreement with DUI is dead, and that VMRO is under no obligation to offer them a coalition agreement after the elections, even if DUI wins more votes than the opposition Albanian parties.

In 2006, VMRO formed a coalition with the smaller, but ideologically more acceptable DPA party, shunning DUI, but was forced to bring Ahmeti’s party in the coalition after violence erupted between DPA and DUI in the 2008 elections. Then the parties reached an agreement that, for the sake of ethnic stability, the winning party in the Macedonian camp (which is usually VMRO-DPMNE) will offer a coalition to the winning party in the Albanian camp (usually DUI). But Ahmeti violated this deal after the Colored Revolution, when he joined a coalition with SDSM, even though VMRO was the clear winner in the 2016 general elections.

The principle of forming a coalition between the two ethnic winners is no longer in force for VMRO-DPMNE. DUI violated it in 2016. Of course that our preferred partner is the Albanian opposition and our goal is to reach 61 votes and more independently, Mucunski said. This would allow VMRO-DPMNE to form a stable Government without the blackmail from Albanian parties, which was typical in the past eight years of SDSM – DUI governments.

The Albanian oppositon is uniting and has a good chance to challenge DUI, following a string of major corruption scandals involving top DUI officials. The DUI vote could be difficult to distinguish in the elections anyway, considering that SDSM is desperate for a pre-election coalition with DUI, where the two parties would filed joint lists of candidates and would have their votes lumped together.