Macedonia Parliament Speaker Survives No-Confidence Vote

Only 14 members of the 120 seat parliament supported the no-confidence motion tabled by the opposition against Veljanovski. 68 deputies from the ruling majority, led by the centre right VMRO DPMNE party, voted against Veljanovski’s dismissal.

The opposition parties that tabled the motion, the Social Democrats, SDSM, and the New Social Democrats, NSDP, accused the speaker of not doing enough to investigate the July 1 incident in the parliament building and for secretly obstructing the formation of an inquiry committee to determine what happened on that day.

The opposition deputies claim that on July 1 the police eavesdropped on the party members while they were carrying out their activities in their parliament headquarters. The opposition MPs also claim that they were then intimidated by armed policemen who were planted in front of their offices.

“Veljanovski has turned into a puppet in the hands of the Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and the Police Minister Gordana Jankulovska,” the opposition legislators claimed ahead of the vote.

Meanwhile, MPs from the parliamentary majority said that Saturday's session was an attempt to distort facts. They accused the opposition of deliberately staging the incident in order to cause confusion and to blame the ruling party.

The July 1 altercation, caught in part on the parliament security videocamera, erupted when the opposition deputies reacted to the police presence. The camera also caught the verbal brawl, pushing and shoving in the imbroglio that followed.

Police Minister Jankulovska later confirmed that the police had officers at the scene during the brawl but accused the opposition of staging the incident in order to portray the police as unprofessional.

In his speech on Saturday Veljanovski noted that he was in favour of the formation of an inquiry committee but that all attempts to agree on this subject with the opposition died when “the opposition put forward a motion for my dismissal”.

For the past several years the EU has encouraged Macedonia to improve its level of political dialogue. The ruling party and the opposition at Saturday's session accused each other of not making an effort to improve this image.