North Macedonia holds presidential and parliamentary elections Wednesday

Giant portraits of Hristijan Mickoski, the leader of the center-right main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, are displayed on a building in Skopje, North Macedonia , on Monday, May 6, 2024. Voters go to the polls on Wednesday in North Macedonia to cast ballots for parliamentary election and presidential runoff, for the second time in two weeks.

More than 1,700 candidates are competing for the unicameral parliament’s 120 seats. There are also three seats reserved for expatriates, but in the last election, in 2020, turnout was too low to fill those seats.The month-long campaign has focused on fighting corruption, improving the slugging economy and alleviating poverty, but the main hot-button issue has been over North Macedonia’s struggle to join the European Union.

That dispute was resolved in 2018 with the country calling itself North Macedonia. But Bulgaria has since been blocking the country’s EU bid, saying it will lift its veto only when North Macedonia amends its constitution. VMRO-DPMNE leader and election favorite Hristijan Mickoski has accused the ruling center-left coalition of presiding over a “pandemic” of corruption, though his own party’s record is far from clean. The VMRO-DPMNE’s last prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, is a fugitive from justice in Hungary.

For the presidency, incumbent Stevo Pendarovski of the SDSM is the clear underdog to Gordana Siljanovska Davkova of VMRO-DPMNE, who won 41.2% of the vote in the first round on April 24 to Pendarovski’s 20.5%. The “European Front,” a coalition of nine parties, is dominated by the Democratic Union for Integration . DUI, founded by people who took part in the 2001 secessionist rebellion, has been the coalition partner of every government for the past two decades.

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