The mayoral candidate in Skopje’s Karpos district, Stevce Jakimovski, informed that the ruling SDSM party are interfering in his Facebook group and comments, in an attempt to discredit him.

Jakimovski said that there is an unusual number of obviously bogus accounts that were liking his posts without his knowledge. Then, in an organized campaign, SDSM online activists began sharing screenshots from these “bots” as evidence that Jakimovski is allegedly hired them.

Notice how (outgoing Mayor) Stefan Bogoev shared the allegations about these Chinese-Vietnamese Facebook likes and is sending it to all SDSM activists to share it. This makes it clear we have an attempt to discredit my Facebook campaign. Obviously they are unable to run a fair campaign, Jakimovski said.

Before the SDSM “bot vs bot” allegations, Jakimovski predicted that something like this could happen and spoke about the tactics SDSM plans to use in a TV interview. Jakimovski is a former SDSM official who left the party to successfully run for Mayor, and has since faced persecution from SDSM aligned prosecutors. He ranked second in the first round of the local elections, behind the SDSM candidate Dusko Veskovski, but chances are that supporters of the third ranked VMRO-DPMNE candidate will push his across the finish line in the run-off on October 31st.