April 29, 2004
The President of Macedonia
Nobody pays much attention to Macedonia. It's small, it's isolated, it's one of the poorest countries in Europe.
But there are some interesting things happening there. Here's one: Macedonia had presidential elections yesterday, and they were peaceful and clean. Nobody got shot or intimidated or even threatened, and the general consensus of observers was that the election was pretty clean.
The elections were held to replace Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, who died in a plane crash in Bosnia a few months ago. Like Serbia, Macedonia runs its presidential elections in two steps -- a free-for-all, followed by a runoff between the two top candidates a couple of weeks later.
(Unlike Serbia, Macedonia still has the old Yugoslav law requiring 50% turnout. There were some worries that they wouldn't get the necessary number of votes, but they did.)
The winner was the present Prime Minister, Branko Crvenkovski. He was considered a "center-left" candidate and "pro-Western".
Labels can be slippery in this region, of course. Still, what we have here is a professional politician, who is neither egregiously corrupt nor a demagogue, who has just been elected by a democratic process that seems to have been clean and fair. Good for Macedonia, and let's hope the rest of the world takes notice.
Mind, it's not all happy shiny. The losing candidate is alleging "massive" fraud in the election. It would have to be, since the official count has him losing by about 20 percentage points.
And, of course, Macedonia remains a painfully poor country, and ethnically divided too. There hasn't been any open violence since 2001, but Albanians and Slavs still view each other with deep distrust, and there are many people on both sides who view the present political system as just a temporary expedient.
Still, that just makes it that much more impressive that they've managed to hold a fair and peaceful election.
Posted by douglas at April 29, 2004 12:32 PM