Macedonian presidential election

If you do an image google on Agron Buxhaku, one of the candidates in today’s Macedonian presidential election, you’ll see the first link is this picture from my livejournal scrapbook. He’s a good friend of mine, but is currently lying about fifth out of seven candidates in the polls. Another friend, Nano Ružin, is apparently going to come sixth out of seven. I also know (but do not especially like) Ljubomir Frčkoski who is second or third in the latest polls. The election will certainly be won by Gjorgje Ivanov who is backed by the main party in the government – probably not today but in a runoff two weeks from now against Frčkoski (who is the candidate of the main opposition party).

What’s interesting is that a lot of the polls suggest Frčkoski is under serious pressure for the second place in the runoff from an ethnic Albanian candidate, Imer Selmani, the leader of a new party called Demokracia e Re (which means “New Democracy” in Albanian). Doug Muir has blogged about this elsewhere; I’ll just add that my experience has been that Macedonian opinion polls tend to overstate the support of all Albanian parties, so I suspect he won’t make it, and even if he does Ivanov will will the run-off against either of them. But in any case it’s a significant kick in the teeth for my mate Agron’s party, which since he co-founded it in 2002 has won the majority of Macedonia’s Albanian votes (as long as the elections were done fairly).

There is one woman candidate, Mirushe Hoxha, a university professor who has never stood in an election before but is being backed by the oldest of the three ethnic Albanian parties. She is currently running seventh out of seven.

I’m sorry that Nano and Agron are likely to lose, but as long as the former Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski doesn’t make it to the second round, I’ll be happy. It is just over seven years since the mysterious Raštanski Lozja affair, for which nobody was ever successfully prosecuted (and Boškoski was not prosecuted at all). It would also be a good thing if the elections are conducted with less violence than last year’s parliamentary vote.

It also doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things. The outgoing President, Branko Crvenkovski, who moved up to the top spot after his predecessor was killed in a plane crash, has discovered to his dismay that the job left him pretty impotent; he is almost indecently eager to return to the leadership of his own party and, he hopes, the job of Prime Minister after the next parliamentary elections. President Ivanov will have an enjoyable five year term making speeches and attending conferences, but it’s unlikely that the average observer of international politics will register his name much.

One thought on “Macedonian presidential election

  1. Either he was on a horse and she riding behind him, or he was talking about carrying her on his back.

Comments are closed.