Ohrid, 17 October 2025 (MIA) – There is no retreat, no surrender… This country can do better. A time is coming when the country turns a new page, we are writing a new history, led by a generation determined to win, said VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski at the party’s final campaign rally in Ohrid ahead of Sunday’s local elections.

Addressing the rally, Mickoski said the work currently being done in the country will be the foundation for things to be built in the next decade – “a change in the system and the state of mind, a revolution of thought, leaving the powder keg… a reset of the system without partisan or any other division”.

Mickoski spoke about areas the Government would focus on in the coming period: the judiciary and the economy. In the judiciary Mickoski vowed to implement thorough reforms in the courts and prosecution as institutions “closely connected to injustices and protection of crime”.

Regarding the economy and the preservation of the living standard, Mickoski said the Government is negotiating a new US$150 million foreign investment that would bring thousands of new jobs.

“We are in the final stages of negotiations with a US – British company that will invest up to US$150 million in the defense industry in Macedonia… We expect investments in the defense sector to exceed US$1 billion,” Mickoski said.

At the rally, the VMRO-DPMNE leader urged voters to “teach SDSM and Venko Filipche a lesson” on Sunday. Mickoski said if the country was orderly in the past, then the people would’ve rewarded them and they would’ve still been in power and not in “deep opposition and a clinically dead party”. 

“That divorce from reality indicates that SDSM and the leader of SDSM failed to draw a lesson from their rule, that the people punished them due to the poverty, the double-figure inflation, because 600.000 of our compatriots lived on only Mden 150 a day, because the tenders and crime became SDSM’s trademark, and due to their haggling with the national interests, the betrayals, and the trivialization of the most essential issues concerning the country,” Mickoski said.

The VMRO-DPMNE leader stressed a mass turnout is important to ensure the politicians get a “serious lesson” in the first round.

“Because if they don’t receive a stinging slap and a knockout in the elections, they’ll think they can get away with this in the future. They’ll believe they have left behind a decent country and that idleness and crime can be rewarded. That’s why it’s important to turn out and vote in large numbers, because the lesson means a knockout in the very first round of the elections. That’s why every vote matters, and we must finish the job in the first round,” Mickoski said.

At the party’s final rally, Mickoski urged the citizens of Ohrid to back the party’s mayoral candidate, Kiril Pecakov, and called on them to not give their vote “in vain to the smaller parties and the political exhibitionists” but to instead vote for those “who can really change the system”.

Photo: MIA