Skopje, 22 December 2022 (MIA) – When public trust in the institutions is low, democracy is in real danger. When clientelism and party loyalty are the criteria for employment and promotion, we shouldn’t be surprised by the weakness of the institutions, President Stevo Pendarovski said Thursday.

Delivering his annual address in Parliament, Pendarovski said that foreign policy has been determining the dynamics of political processes in the country for too long.

“We need an internal focus, at home,” he urged.

“The insufficient pace of our economic and social development in the transition is a consequence of several internal structural factors, but one of the key reasons for the long, decades-long history of reforms initiated and not completed is corruption and the related phenomenon of political clientelism that erodes the trust of citizens in the institutions,” the President stressed.

The incredible media interest that followed the visit of the so-called US “sanctions team” for Pendarovski represents the best confirmation of the distrust the citizens have in the domestic authorities when they see the only hope for justice in foreign and international institutions.

“However, the reality is that no one from outside will eradicate corruption in the Republic of North Macedonia if our institutions and elected political representatives of the citizens do not do so,” the head of state said noting the stake is high in this fight.

“The state will either put the criminals behind bars in closed-type prisons, or some of them will continue, with the money stolen from the people, to build an image of honest and virtuous citizens and ridicule all the rest from a safe distance,” Pendarovski said.

“In that clash between the criminals and the huge number of citizens with a face, there are two goals: first, as a state to show concrete results, not only public arrests, but long-term prison sentences and return of stolen goods, and, second, to respect the presumption of innocence, which means, we should not condemn people in public before the competent court has condemned them,” he stated.

Still, Pendarovski highlighted, all our efforts will fail if the competent judicial authorities settle with figures known by the entire public to have provided their unborn children and grandchildren with public money.

“A thesis that many of us have been repeating for years is that there is no justice if there are no current politicians in prison for corruption, but there will be no justice as long as judges and prosecutors who make scandalous decisions that probably have corrupt motives are free,” said the President.

President Pendarovski warned that due to poverty and lack of rule of law, the “white plague” continues to decimate the nation. “We can count and add the diaspora and delude ourselves that there are more of us, but the harsh truth is that, according to the projections of the United Nations, by 2050, if these trends continue, the country will have only about one million inhabitants from the two million that we were when we constituted the state,” he concluded.