Macedonia Ruling Party Savages Journalist and NGO

Macedonia's ruling VMRO-DPMNE party has slated CIVIL-Center for Freedom, a local NGO monitoring the April presidential and general elections, calling it a “so-called NGO” that “spreads lies” and works for the opposition Social Democrats.

The NGO previously told the Sloboden Pecat" daily that it had spotted a number of irregularities at the start of the presidential election campaign, including pressures on public administration and municipal employees to attend rallies of the ruling party.

The newspaper also wrote about cases spotted by Civil whereby school principals had allegedly released children early from school so they could attend ruling party meetings.

A day earlier, the party attacked Branko Geroski, the editor of Sloboden Pecat, by name for running the story. The party also launched the attack before the story was made public in the hard-copy edition of the newspaper.

“People already see Geroski as a court jester in journalism who will do or sell anything for a little bit of attention,” VMRO DPMNE wrote.

“Geroski obviously does his best to earn the hundreds of thousands of euros from SOROS [the foundation Open Society – Macedonia] and the financial affection of [opposition leader Zoran] Zaev," it said.

"He shows in person how low, servile, shameful and miserable he can be, working for his bosses who, apart from owning his media outlet, own his personality as well,” the party added.

It is not the first time that the editor has been a target of personal attacks. He has accused the goverment of Nikola Gruevski of hounding him for years for his criticism of official policies.

CIVIL on Wednesday said that it was surprised by the strident tone used against...