Former Healthcare Minister Venko Filipce was elected as new leader of the opposition SDSM party, after Dimitar Kovacevski resigned following his major defeat in the general and the presidential elections. Filipce won about 8,500 votes while his chief opponent, Jovan Despotovski, won 2,300 votes of the 12,000 party members who voted.

Filipce is seen as representative of the Zoran Zaev faction in the party, and he will be in place for less than a year, when what was supposed to be Zaev’s original term as party leader expires. SDSM will then hold a regular leadership contest, as the election of Kovacevski and now of Filipce are considered irregular elections. Given Filipce’s close personal and business ties with Zaev, he’s expected to be a placeholder, if Zaev chooses to return to the helm of SDSM in 2025, or his proxy in running the party. Despotovski, on the other hand, is seen as representative of the elitist Skopje wing of the party, once led by Radmila Sekerinska. Despotovski and another candidate, former Defense Minister Slavjanka Petrovska, strongly criticized the Zaev faction of abusing the process and of preventing a proper change in the party that would have restored some of the dramatically lost popularity of SDSM.

Filipce promised to unite the party and to be open to and listen to SDSM members. Shortly before the election, the IRL investigative news site added to the long list of corruption allegations against Filipce, by informing the public that he owns a company in Bulgaria which he didn’t report to the Anti-Corruption Commission and that he had the Government fast track approval for the opening of a solar power plant near Dojran, which he co-owns with Vice Zaev, Zoran Zaev’s brother. Filipce was accused of extorting private hospitals and healthcare providers, routing the Covid vaccine procurement through a bogus company in China, trying to sell the Military Hospital in Skopje to the owner of he Sistina Clinic where he worked and building a major residential development in an expensive part of Skopje with funding whose source he did not disclose. SDSM’s attemtps to build a cult of personality over him and his handling of the Covid crisis ended in the worst way imaginable when the Tetovo Covid ward, built under Filipce’s orders by the company owned by a top SDSM official who also built his solar plant in Dojran, burnt down with the loss of 14 lives.