The first pre-election televised duel between Hristijan Mickoski and Zoran Zaev is off to a feisty start, as the leaders of the two main parties in Macedonia clashed over the abuse of the judiciary. Mickoski pointed to the scandalous law on state prosecutors that Zaev rammed through Parliament recently, that specifically places one set of rules for VMRO-DPMNE officials and another for himself and SDSM officials. The law would protect Zaev from criminal charges based on any wiretaps – a practices he used to no end against VMRO-DPMNE officials, even as the number of corruption scandals swirling around Zaev multiplies.

You asked for amnesty for yourself and your associates. I look you in the eye and tell you, you will be held responsible. Everybody who violates the law, myself included, will be investigated. Those who pressured judges, asked for bribes, abused their power, they will be held responsible. The evidence will be presented to the end, Mickoski said, listing the many scandals that involve Zaev.

He pointed to the fact that the PPO law which Zaev insisted on provides that wiretaps will be used in all cases initiated by the now disgraced Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, almost exclusively against VMRO-DPMNE officials, but not against new cases that have shown up in the past three years, where Zaev and officials of his SDSM party are accused of corruption on the basis of video and audio leaks.

If you refered to the judiciary in the past as the Swarovski judiciary, now under you we have a Louis Vuitton judiciary. SDSM activists are nominated to the Judicial Council, one didn’t even have time to purge her Facebook account of all the pictures with Zoran Zaev. Now we listen to tapes of Zaev as he is directing decisions by the court, Mickoski said.

Zaev refered to the amnesties he gave to some of the former VMRO-DPMNE officials who he blackmailed into supporting his imposed name change as “reconciliation”. Mickoski responded that these include people who Zaev accused of trying to kill him, like Krsto Mukoski, whose vote was necessary to rename Macedonia. “You had Mukoski kept in prison and driven to the Parliament to vote”, Mickoski said.