Macedonian Rightists Target Ruling Party

Ljube Boskoski won 150.000 votes as presidential candidate in 2009 | Photo by: OM

Right-wing parties dissatisfied with the centrist VMRO-DPMNE party of Nikola Gruevski say they hope to make off with about a third of its 300,000 "hard core" voters. The party has been in power since 2006.

Marjan Dodovski, head of the VMRO People’s Party, said that this would bring them “ten or more” legislators in the 123-seat parliament on June 5.

Dodovski hopes to galvanize votes through the political comeback of Ljubco Georgievski, the former prime minister and former leader of VMRO-DPMNE who left the party in 2002. Georgievski holds the post of honorary president of Dodovski’s party.

Another contestant for right-wing votes is the United for Macedonia party of Ljube Boskoski, a former high-ranking VMRO0DPMNE official and former police minister.

After his acquittal of war crimes in The Hague in 2008, Boskoski returned to the country and soon after started harshly criticising Gruevski.

In the 2009 presidential elections, Boskoski won some 150,000 votes, which was considered a significant success. However, he still came third, behind the now President, Gjorge Ivanov of VMRO-DPMNE, who won 450,000 votes, and the opposition Social Democrats' Ljubomir Frckoski, who garnered some 260,000 votes.

The party now hopes to outmatch its last election score, says Miroslav Spiroski, a candidate for Boskoski’s party.

“We plan to win these elections and form a government,” Spiroski told Balkan Insight.

Filip Petrovski, a VMRO-DPMNE veteran who was marginalized after Gruevski became party leader in 2002, has also entered the election race, forming his Democratic Rightists party just before the elections.

Marjan Dodovski hopes of winning more than 10 legislators | Photo by: Balkan Insight

“It takes much effort to organize a young party but we hope to secure at least one or two seats,” Petrovski told Balkan Insight.

Officially, the main ruling party says it is not concerned by political competition from the right.

But the party recently started repeating calls at each rally to rightist sympathizers not to vote for smaller rightist parties.

The last such call came on Wednesday from Vlatko Gjorcev who is the party's front runner in central Macedonia.

Speaking at a rally in the town of Veles he argued that every vote given to the smaller rightist parties decimated the strength of the conservative political option, and went directly in favour of the opposition Social Democrats.

Most opinion polls conducted recently give the ruling party a distinct advantage over the Social Democrats, and it appears on course to win the election.