Skopje, 6 May 2024 (MIA) - VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski said Monday he expects VMRO-DPMNE's coalition to win close to 61 seats in Parliament at Wednesday’s elections.

In a Plusinfo podcast, Mickoski said SDSM should seek the reason for their defeat not in the past few months, but as early as the COVID crisis “when they committed abuses of national resources, institutions...”

“It was as early as then that their defeat gradually began and happened more seriously at the local elections when they had two convincing defeats and the opposition coalition won the majority of mayoral posts, and that should have been an indicator. That’s why, taking into account the interests of the state, we asked for early parliamentary elections at that time, for the will of the majority of citizens to be respected in a democratic way,” Mickoski said.

According to the VMRO-DPMNE leader, early elections should have been held as early as when Zoran Zaev resigned from his post as SDSM leader.

“It would’ve been normal for Zoran Zaev, when he resigned from SDSM, to resign from the government and head to elections, but then in a weird way Dimitar Kovachevski was installed and we can reach a conclusion that this was the first more serious mistake after the local elections, and then the subservient role and inexperience of Kovachevski came to the surface,” Mickoski said.

Mickoski assessed SDSM’s election campaign as “confusing” with their message “changing from rally to rally”. 

Photo: VMRO-DPMNE