Politics of North Macedonia

On the other hand, the independent candidate for the mayor of Skopje, Danela Arsovska, declared victory, and the leading Macedonian opposition party VMRO-DPMNE calls for early parliamentary elections.

The Prime Minister of the Republic of North Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, resigned last night after the poor performance of his SDSM party in the second round of local elections, world agencies reported.

He resigned due to the debacle in the second round of local elections.
"I take responsibility for the results of these elections and resign from the Prime Minister and the President of the SDSM," SDSM leader Zoran Zaev said tonight.

The results of the municipal polls have brought the governing Social Democrats' arch-rivals in the right-wing VMRO DPMNE party back into the game - and closer to possibly forming a new government.

Local elections will be held today in the neighboring Republic of North Macedonia, a BGNES reported.

1,824,864 people have the right to vote. 301 candidates are running for mayor and 10,600 for municipal councilors. Twelve candidates are running for mayor of the capital, Skopje. The second round of elections will take place on October 31.

The forthcoming local elections on October 17 will again be dominated by male mayoral candidates, official data on candidacies that was recently published by the State Electoral Commission reveals.

Out of a total of 298 candidates who will be competing for mayoral seats in the country's 81 municipalities, only 26, or less than nine per cent, are women, the data shows.

Opposition parties, government critics and some medical doctors have called for the resignation of North Macedonia's Health Minister, Venko Filipce, over the fire that took 14 lives in Tetovo's COVID-19 modular hospital earlier this week.

North Macedonia's parliament has adopted a resolution which draws so-called "red lines" in talks with Bulgaria on the Macedonian identity and language.

Initially filed in early July by the main opposition right wing VMRO DPMNE party, it was supported by 95 out of the 96 MPs present in the 120-seat parliament, with only one abstaining.

American football stars Lance Briggs, Turk McBride, and Donnie Caldwell, backed by the founder and director of the famed Exit music festival in Serbia, Dusan Kovacevic, have told BIRN that they have already picked a location for growing medicinal marijuana in North Macedonia.

The mayor of Skopje's municipality of Centar, Sasa Bogdanovic, said on Monday that a large unfinished memorial complex dedicated to Skopje-born Mother Teresa should not be completed but erased from the city's urban plan because it blocks an important pedestrian street leading to the main square.