There was no need for any magic and special powers to predict what was going to happen with and in VMRO-DPMNE after the voting on the constitutional changes late in the night on October 19. In the morning, before the major decision, when the Russian player Mickoski was left without eight MPs, I wrote “Happy VMRO day. On that day DPMNE will probably fall apart. Festive”. (BURST: “Macedonian political surrealism”). Yes, exactly on the day when we are all forced to celebrate it as a national holiday. Some sort of religious-occult holiday when the party “experienced catharsis”, according to the words of one of the few remaining believers, Aleksandar Nikolovski.
Provincial Neron
Mickoski is also left without the participants in the bloody attack on the Parliament, who realized they were Gruevski’s and the Family’s cannon fodder. They are also left without one thunder, although that really is an invisible scratch, as much as the party is invisible and insignificant, regardless of the enormous wealth of the vulgar quasi-politician and meteorologist from the village of Podrzi Konj. What shakes the party the most is the splitting of the Family – the quarrel between the cousins Mijalkov and Gruevski.
Provincial Neron on the political scene, a servant who has no sense for politics, nor for leadership, in a moment of his vigor decided to wag the party stamp and to hand out discharges in the highest party echelon, first to Petar Bogojevski and several others, and ahead of the holiday of theirs also to – Mitko Jancev, Kostadin Bogdanov, to MPs who voted for the constitutional changes, Nikola Todorov, and even the mighty Sasho Mijalkov. Mickoski and his closest servants have set off in a total war, defending the last political bunker in which the crushed and terrified, legally convicted and “referred” to prison Nikola Gruevski is in.
On a sharp knife-edge
Now it really remains for the Family that has fallen apart and its believers to rely on the “nation-wide resistance” of the right leftists, udbas and desperate professors, and other insignificant ones at the bottom of political careers and bad actors.
VMRO-DPMNE is going on the sharp edge of the knife. The split was obvious with the emerging of the first set of Reformers, and one could say even before that, with the group gathered around Jove Kekenovski.
Now comes the period of the party’s (semi) falling part, and not catharsis, as Nikolovski likes to believe.
DPMNE in court?
There are at least three directions in which this agonizing and dark political soup opera can develop. The least possible of all of them is a situation in which VMRO-DPMNE as a party can entirely be faced with a difficult responsibility for all the crimes and betrayals of the national interests in the past years, and even decades.
The last one in that series would be VMRO-DPMNE’s responsibility, as a legal entity and organized structure, for the bloody attack on the Parliament. In that case, the entire existence of this party, as a legal entity on the country’s political map, would be questioned. However, there is no such judiciary in Macedonia that would surpass itself and would start and end such a process.
Moreover, if that judiciary were just and unselective, it will also have to take a look at all the other political parties in the country….And, that would be a catharsis!
VMRO-DPMNE’s pretty face
The second direction in which the situation of this party can develop would be entirely opposite to this scenario, and that would be for the party to find the strength and to reorganize and democratize itself, to have modern democrats without a criminal past at the top of the party. To set the party on its feet and to step towards the European future of Macedonia, offering all of its qualities, through quality cadre, for progress. This party can have a pretty face.
Such a VMRO-DPMNE, consolidated, rehabilitated, modernized and democratized, can become a leader in the country, that new and pretty face of a modern conservative party can become an example and encouragement for leaving the concept of sultan parties, which is not typical only for VMRO-DPMNE.
It is not impossible, but it is too difficult.
Casablanca
What is more likely than the optimistic scenario is that VMRO-DPMNE will break apart into serval fractions that will be orbiting around the wealth and influence of the party. Old new cadres will turn the party into a kind of Casablanca, where criminal, business and political interests, both domestic and foreign, will intertwine.
This certainly does not exclude fights, riding in trunks and liquidations in the coming period. In the meanwhile, Savevski and Bacev will be waving Russian flags, leading the “radical mass protests” of 10-15 lumpen radicals throughout Macedonia, marking the end of the total war of Gruevski, Mickovski and the “remaining drunk brotherhood”.
Here we also have the poorly understood and even more poorly carried out process of reconciliation, which many (even I) have already understood it as amnesty. A total mess. As to the difference between the reconciliation and the amnesty that (probably) will fade away, we are yet to be an unwillingly pushed public in the Macedonia circus arena.
Photo by: Incendie à Rome, 18 juillet 64 par Hubert Robert (musée d’art moderne André-Malrauxau Havre)
