Igor Georgievski from VMRO-DPMNE called on the office of state prosecutors to begin acting against the SDSM party officials who were caught bribing voters in the run up to the early general elections on Wednesday. VMRO considers the elections to have been held in an undemocratic atmosphere, and points to the mass bribery of voters by SDSM as the main reason that the results were skewed.

The main project SDSM was implementing in the past three years was to conduct massive and uncontrolled bribery of voters. Just before the elections, the party put spending cards each worth between 100 and 200 EUR for a total sum of 30 million EUR. Days before the elections, SDSM was distributing fuel subsidies for farmers, in violation of the law banning such spending befor the elections. The Government distributed funds to 40 NGO groups two weeks before the election. Select companies shared 100 million EUR in so-called stimulus spending. And this was followed up with person on person bribery on the ground, on election day and the two prior days. Two SDSM party Mayors were caught and detained for bribery but the prosecutors are not requesting detention and are sabotaging the case against them, said Georgievski.

Both these incidents were reported in the south-east, and in dozens of other cases lower level SDSM official were suspected of distributing money in poor, mainly Roma neighborhoods, in exchange for votes. Georgievski pointed to nearly 30 cases of election day bribery, including the arrest of a person in Stip who was carrying 40 identity cards of voters who were being bribed.

The prosecutors are silent on these incidents because they are still trying to protect Zoran Zaev, Georgievski said.