Skopje, 9 May 2024 (MIA) — VMRO-DPMNE-backed university professor Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova will be the sixth president of North Macedonia and the first woman elected to the post.

Siljanovska-Davkova defeated incumbent President Stevo Pendarovski in the presidential runoff on May 8.

According to the initial results released by the State Election Commission, Siljanovska-Davkova won 560,170 votes (65.14%), and SDSM-supported Pendarovski won 251,541 (29.25%).

During her election campaign under the slogan "Macedonia, Proud Again," Siljanovska-Davkova said she would not use the adjective "North" but would stand in front of a sign with the new constitutional name of the country. 

She had also said she was against the constitutional changes to include the Bulgarian ethnic community in the Constitution, but if Parliament made this decision, she said she would honor it given that it was made by a constitution-making body. 

She told voters the fundamental values of the constitutional order should be respected, saying that the Prespa Agreement, for her, was an open question, politically and legally.

In her statement following her win on Wednesday, she pledged to be a non-partisan President.

"I will behave as the President of all citizens. This means of all ethnic groups, of all members of parties, of people who are not members of the parties – because no President can ask for unity while clinging to party lines," Siljanovska-Davkova said.

Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova (b. 1953, Ohrid) graduated from the Faculty of Law in Skopje in 1978. She received her PhD, cum laude, from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, with a dissertation on "Local Self-Government – Between Norms and Reality" in 1994.

She has taught Political System and Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law in Skopje. She has been a member of the Constitutional Commission of the Parliament (1990-1992), a government minister (1992-1994), a member of the Council of Europe's Group of Independent Experts on the European Charter of Local Self-Government, and a member of the Venice Commission. She has written dozens of papers on Constitutional Law and the Political System.

Siljanovska-Davkova was VMRO-DPMNE's presidential candidate also in 2019, when she lost to Stevo Pendarovski.

In the 2020 parliamentary elections, Siljanovska-Davkova headed VMRO-DPMNE's MP candidate list for the First Electoral District and received a parliamentary seat in August 2020.

After the official results are released, a parliamentary session for the presidential inauguration should be convened by May 12 at the latest, when President Pendarovski's term in office ends.

The country has had five heads of state since its independence. Kiro Gligorov, the first President, and Gjorge Ivanov were the only two-term presidents. Boris Trajkovski, Branko Crvenkovski, and Stevo Pendarovski have served one term. mr/