Milosevic made it to The Hague, Mickoski won't even make it to Brussels.
"Expect an investment boom in energy, unprecedented not only in Macedonia, but also in the region!" Expect large foreign investments in the first hundred days, said Hristijan Mickoski after receiving the mandate to form the new government from President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova. Meanwhile, he also announced a categorical fight against crime and corruption!
This is the two thousandth and the first variation of the same mantra, which has been cycled for 32 years in North Macedonia, but with a different name, through which megalomaniac promises, as well as the glorification of the national cult, distract from national robbery.
The promise of a huge investment boom, especially in energy, in the country with the lowest economic growth in Europe and the biggest budget deficit is really surprising. The energy sector and infrastructure are vital to any country and always and everywhere energy strategies are drawn up 50 years ahead!
In North Macedonia, such an energy strategy was prepared by MANI (the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts) about 15 years ago, but it was never completed.
The promise of serious projects in the field of energy, which require preliminary economic analyzes and risk assessment, a complex area that in Western countries is of immanent importance and takes a lot of time, is really frivolous. Mickoski promises huge energy projects and, imagine, this in the first 100 days, without initial analyzes and without telling the citizens where they will find funds for them! Many, after such a statement, wonder if Mickoski has magical abilities or is he the new David Copperfield?!
The new mandate holder simultaneously called for the unification of the Macedonian national fabric and said that Macedonia is a land of Macedonians, Serbs, Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, Roma and Bosniaks.
With a cynical posture, pretentious and evil, arrogant and vengeful, he never mentioned, not even on June 6, the Bulgarians living for centuries in the territory of today's North Macedonia, even though he is the chairman of a party that bears the name of the historical VMRO, created precisely from the Macedonian Bulgarians!
It seems that the chauvinistic farce will continue unabated. The idolatrous raw material constitutes the swollen identity, the sanctuary in the middle of the tribal imagination, the connective tissue that holds the administrative electorate embodied in a nation.
At the same time, while Mr. Mickoski speaks with extremely well-rehearsed rhetoric and body language and looks reverently at the branded flock, the party clergy ponder the numbers and how to line their pockets. After everything that could be stolen had been destroyed and stolen, the return of nationalist mythomania and the "enemy" industry seems inevitable.
The constant and unfettered parade of the mafia through the political establishment, as well as the empowerment of criminals to fight crime, must be cloaked in the mantle of preserving national identity - you understand, preserving the established criminal system for which Reinhard Priebe (former director of the Western Balkans in the EC) spoke decades ago.
But in order to cover up all this, the propaganda machine made up of the philistine media has to step up the production of state enemies and national traitors, and that according to the already tested Tito matrix and totalitarian lexicon. Bulgarians should be understood as hostile elements, or more precisely, as elements that are incompatible with the "pure Macedonian ancient being" presented by the guardians of the "sacred Macedonian identity". It seems that the wire fence of the already hermetically sealed state will be stretched with guard posts from which the deified fortress of national and holy Macedonia will be watched.
This is the police approach of the political nationalist representatives, so that the inviolable and pure Macedonian identity is protected by mechanisms of state power with already practiced methods of soft pressure, known from the time of Tito's totalitarian system on the so-called Bulgarian enemies and traitors. The national-chauvinist narrative will be at the fore, while key reforms, the fight against crime and corruption will be left somewhere in the background, shrouded in nationalist hatred, because it is best managed by intensifying feelings of anger and fear.
But historical experience shows us that all these national-chauvinist cries, which are the fruit of nationalistic despair, can have a healthy aroma of a dead bug. The same words that Hristijan Mickoski and his candidate for head of state and now president, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, used in the election campaign and with which he accused political opponents of some kind of betrayal of the nation, were also used by Slobodan Milosevic shortly before he fell from power in October 2000.
Milosevic at least made it to The Hague, while Mickoski doesn't look like he'll even make it to Brussels any time soon.
But everything has an end. Although Mickoski heralds a new beginning, it is essentially the beginning of his end. National chauvinistic rhetoric seems to drive him from one knot to another, from one mistake to another, so that his spectacular downfall inevitably follows. Daily reports from official Athens are already warning that at the upcoming NATO summit, Prime Minister Mitsotakis will raise the issue of non-compliance with the Prespa Agreement by the new government in North Macedonia.
Three days ago, in a TV show, Mr. Ivica Bocevski, otherwise a representative of Siljanovska's cabinet, was asked how the leaders of North Macedonia would represent the country at the upcoming NATO summit. Macedonia, North Macedonia or "our country" will they call it?
Bocevski replied that Mickoski, who will appear in NATO itself as Prime Minister, will be creative and come up with something! Good question from the journalist, clear answer from Bocevski. What will be the creation of the new Prime Minister Mickoski, we have yet to see and hear. He's really going to need magical abilities to get out of the hellish circle he's gotten himself into. | BGNES
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Eli Sekulovska, human rights activist in North Macedonia. The analysis was written specifically for BGNES Agency.
