Zaev is leaving and with this move, he is making one last desperate manoeuvre in an attempt to attract the attention of the EU and remind them that, if the European Council in December again fails to deliver the promised start of negotiations, the pro-European energy of the Macedonian society may be irreversibly lost from the Macedonian horizon.
After four years as an oppositon leader and another four years as Prime Minister, Zoran Zaev is retiring from politics. He started with great enthusiasm, driven by the ideal of the EU and he ends as a victim of that same enthusiasm which now, eight years later, seems like infantile naivety. In the first half of his political career as an oppositionist, he went through a political thriller in which he was the main target of the corrupt and autocratic government of the then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. He managed to escape an assassination attempt on him, while his family, including his children, was harassed by the brutal methods that the regime of Gruevski did not hesitate to use in order to retain power. In the second half, he took over the leadership of the country which in the EC reports was marked as – captured. In the four years he was Prime Minister, he went through four election processes and a referendum to change the country’s name, which resolved the 30-year dispute with Greece. A problem that all his predecessors knew had to be solved, but no one had the political courage to do so, because it was more convenient to calculate the daily political vicissitudes that secured a long political career at the expense of the interests of the state.
In an extremely dramatic process of changing the constitutional name, he managed to convince almost 700,000 citizens to support this unpopular process. No one, including me as the author of this text, felt comfortable voting for my country to accept the adjective North, but we all passed that huge dumpling through our throats, believing in all the promises that came to us from all over Europe that, after the name change, we would become NATO member and we would start membership negotiations with the EU. This would be a realization of two key strategic determinations and provision of the only cohesive force in a multiethnic, multi-confessional, multilingual society such as the Macedonian. NATO membership was achieved and Macedonia managed to get off the list of countries in the Balkans with uncertainty about its territorial integrity.
The second big goal, the negotiation process, the most powerful and probably the only tool with which such a traumatized society could get out of 30 years of transition and enter the process of transformation, remained only a beautiful wish and intention, and a memory of a time when that idea of a European Macedonia had real power to move the processes in the right direction. Today, in the current circumstances, the Progress Report regularly published by the EC, which was once a powerful tool for correcting wrong policies, has become marginal news to which little attention is paid.
Zaev is leaving and with this move he is making one last desperate maneuver in an attempt to attract the attention of the EU and remind them that, if the European Council in December again fails to deliver the promised start of negotiations, the pro-European energy of the Macedonian society may be irreversibly lost from the Macedonian horizon and, instead of a strong source of motivation for reforms, it may turn into a swamp in which fertile ground are found for the demagoguery and populism, whose primary target is exactly the European values.
Borjan Jovanovski, renowned journalist with decades of experience working in the media space.
Published with permission from the Vicinity online portal. Vicinity is an open platform, available to all those from the region, or the Western Balkans, whose voice needs amplifying, and who are eager to express their critical perspective, fresh ideas, and points of view on current affairs. Vicinity is a common initiative of the European Fund for Balkans and the European Fund in Serbia.
