Macedonia Set to Endorse Gruevski's New Team
Parliament on Wednesday is expected to formally vote in the new government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.
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The parliament building in Skopje | Photo by: Balkan Insight |
Nikola Gruevski’s government will almost certainly win approval from parliament, as his centre-right VMRO-DPMNE party and its coalition partners hold over 70 of the 123 seats in the assembly.
Gruevski, whose party did best in the June 5 early elections, has submitted a list of ministers along with a new government platform to parliament.
Assuming he wins the approval of MPs, this will be Gruevski’s third consecutive government since he came to power in 2006. He also won the early elections in 2008.
In the new platform, Gruevski identifies three major goals: NATO and EU accession, boosting the economy and intensifying the fight against corruption and organized crime.
The proposed cabinet contains relatively few new names. Instead, many of the current ministers have either been kept in place or rotated to different positions.
Gruevski is retaining the biggest ethnic Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, as his key government partner. The DUI first joined Gruevski’s government after the 2008 elections.
To keep them onside, the Prime Minister has offered concessions on several key issues concerning the Albanian community.
VMRO-DPMNE has, for example, agreed to scrap plans to re-examine four war crimes cases that the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, had returned to Macedonian courts in 2008.
The cases involve crimes allegedly committed by ethnic Albanian guerrillas during the 2001 armed conflict in the country. Some of the named men are now senior DUI officials.
Wednesday's session is scheduled to start at noon with Gruevski presenting his platform. The vote will presumably take place on Thursday.
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