Politico: Macedonia’s historic name change leaves deep scars

Eighty-one lawmakers narrowly passed the amendments to the constitution after three days of intense negotiations. Prime Minister Zoran Zaev needed a two-thirds majority, or 80 of the country’s 120 MPs, to ratify the deal he made back in June with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Greece has blocked Macedonia’s membership of both NATO and the EU since the early 1990s, arguing that the name infringes culturally and territorially on its own region called Macedonia. [...]

Leaders from NATO and EU member states offered congratulations. NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, hailed the “important contribution to a stable and prosperous region” in a statement on Twitter. EU commissioner for enlargement, Johannes Hahn, tweeted that Friday was “a day that made history!” Hahn said he hopes it “creates a positive dynamic for reconciliation in the whole western Balkan region.” [...]

But concern has grown in recent weeks that the ugly road to the two-thirds majority could carry costs further down the line. Nationalist opposition party the VMRO-DPMNE boycotted the vote, claiming the new name threatens Macedonian identity. They also accused Zaev of using “blackmail and threats” to push it through. [...]

Florian Bieber, professor of Southeast European history and politics at the University of Graz, said the struggle over the name change reflected the realities of political dynamics across the region. “It shows the fundamental dilemma of trying to resolve such an important political dispute. What price is it worth paying in terms of doing a deal which is not exactly transparent, but which in a certain way achieves the ratification?” he asked.

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Jacobin Magazine: By Any Other Name

For Macedonians, the name dispute has always been central to political life. But what is perhaps not so widely discussed, even when the issue reaches international news, is Greece’s power as a member of the EU and NATO to veto Macedonia’s membership in these organizations. Many Macedonians who see membership in the West’s major international organizations as a path to prosperity thus see Greece as the major obstacle faced, notwithstanding austerity-hit Greece’s otherwise weak position within the EU order. Indeed, this issue has been exploited by right-wing parties and nationalist movements in both countries. [...]

Macedonian elections usually have relatively high turnout — in the last vote, some 66 percent. Yet if last Sunday’s referendum saw a decisive 94 percent victory for Yes, only 37 percent of voters actually turned out. As always, a part of the population was simply indifferent and didn’t vote, but what was noteworthy in this case was an effective boycott campaign, driven by multiple different forces. Most important was that a large part of the right-wing electorate didn’t vote, also thanks to a boycott campaign premised on the need to defend the country’s national identity. At the same time, a much smaller group of left-wing forces, such as those from the party Levica (The Left) opposed the deal because of their anti-imperialism and opposition to NATO. [...]

It was largely nationalist forces that drove the boycott campaign. Their strategy was to render the referendum illegitimate through low turnout, rather than any attempt to mobilize a “No” vote. Especially visible was the #Бојкотирам (“I boycott”) movement, which declared itself “an anonymous decentralized group without a leader” and equated Macedonian identity with the defense of its current name. Tellingly of its politics, its website also features an image of alt-right meme Pepe the Frog. The real size and influence of this movement is, however, debatable. Similarly, while international media made inevitable comments about “Russian interference” in the referendum — as displayed by the “I boycott” position advanced by Janko Bachev and his newly founded United Macedonia party, which has openly vaunted its pro-Russian stance — both the scale of the boycott and the longstanding nature of this dispute point to multiple internal reasons for the surprise vote.

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