Macedonia enters into a political crisis, as the ruling SDSM party demands that elections take place on July 5, without reaching agreement on the date with the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party.

The State Electoral Commission did not meet yesterday as its President Oliver Derkoski said that the elections have not officially been set, and Parliament Speaker Talat Xhaferi insisted that only he can officially declare the election date, but SDSM leader Zoran Zaev wants to push forward with his plan for “corona elections”. According to Zaev, the very fact that his loyalist, President Stevo Pendarovski, put an end to the state of emergency means that the election process must resume from where it left off when the epidemic began to spread. The state of emergency was declared in March, but now Macedonia has a far higher rate of infections and deaths, with nine deaths on Sunday – the most during the epidemic, and the number of infections approaching 200 a day. This is clearly going to discourage most voters, but that seems to be exactly what Zaev and SDSM have in mind.

A very very small share of the voters believe that the conditions for holding safe elections have been met. Who would be crazy enough to vote in July? Possibly only the bilnd partisan followers, the hard core of SDSM and Zaev’s business partners. On the other side, we would probably have the VMRO hard core voting. And nobody else. That is what Zaev wants. He wants elections without all those who naively trusted him and his false promises in 2016 now coming out to render their verdit. Zaev then lost by two seats. Now he is likely to lose by far more, said journalist Nenad Mircevski.

Polls have shown that only a quarter of respondents are prepared to vote in early July. VMRO-DPMNE has proposed far safer dates in August and September, and has said that mid July is the earliest time they would even consider elections, provided that a robust OSCE monitoring mission is in place to act on all the expected electoral violations on the part of the Government. More importantly, the opposition demands that the epidemic is sufficiently under control before citizens can be asked to go out and vote in the cramped polling stations.