You rarely get to hear about Macedonia, but in the Balkans, it is something of a bellwether. A decade ago, it set an example of a multiethnic democracy - fragile and dysfunctional, to be sure, yet somehow keeping afloat and gravitating towards the European Union and NATO. More recently, however, it morphed into a one-party state, a replica of Viktor Orban's Hungary with a Balkan twist - a combination of old-fashioned clientelism and kitsch nationalism. [...]
Led by Nikola Gruevski, a one-time technocrat who turned into a populist in the mould of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban, VMRO-DPMNE has been in charge for more than a decade. Marred by high-level and pervasive state capture, their rule came under attack in 2015 when Zaev produced incriminating tapes implicating Gruevski and his close entourage, including family members, of abuse of power on a grand scale. After a wave of protests, Macedonian parties agreed under EU mediation to hold early elections and set up a special prosecutor to investigate the tapes. [...]
But the Macedonian President George Ivanov, elected on a VMRO-DPMNE ticket, refuses to hand the mandate to the Social Democrats. The justification for breaking the constitution is the threat of SDSM "Albanianising" Macedonia. The real reason: Gruevski does not want to be in opposition.
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