Macedonia Ruling Parties Issue Separate Audits

After Macedonia's main ruling VMRO DPMNE party presented a report this weekend on its achievements in office, its junior partner, the ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, says it will issue its own separate report, focusing on its own achievements.

There is nothing wrong with two separate party reports, the DUI said. “Each party simply presents its own achievements in government that were part of its own party platform,” the DUI spokesperson, Bujar Osmani, told Balkan Insight.

He says two reports make sense because, since the government was formed in 2011, “its work plan has been an amalgamation of the platforms of the two winning parties who represent two ethnicities [Albanians and Macedonians]”.

One month before the double early general and presidential elections in April, VMRO DPMNE was the first to present a report on its achievements in government.

In the document of several hundred pages, the party laid claim to a host of reform-oriented economic policies, which it said had attracted important new foreign direct investment.

The opposition Social Democrats “has never had the courage to welcome a single successful project,” party leader and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski complained at the presentation.

In April, Macedonians will choose both a new head of state and 123 MPs in parliament. The general elections are considered the more important of the two, as they will determine who will hold the most powerful post in the country, that of Prime Minister.

This is third early general election in a row since Gruevski became Prime Minister in 2006. Various polls give both VMRO DPMNE and the DUI an edge over their rivals in their respective ethnic blocs.

The opposition...