OSCE Issues Positive Assessment of Macedonian Polls

The OSCE assessment was released a day after polls closed in the general elections for seats in the country's 123-seat parliament.

The monitors expressed concern over allegations of isolated cases of irregularities, intimidation of voters and the questionable accuracy of voting lists, and had criticism for the election campaign.

The day of elections was “overwhelmingly positive” said Roberto Battelli, the head of the OSCE /ODIHR monitoring team. “The voting was conducted in a peaceful atmosphere and the subsequent counting of votes was assessed as positive in 9 out of 10 observed countings”.

He stressed that the wide range of media have helped voters to reach informed decisions about whom to support and that the State Electoral Commission in charge of carrying out the election process has done its job in an expedient and largely professional manner.

Regarding the election campaign, the OSCE/ODIHR stressed that especially the ruling party officials “often failed to separate party from state activities” thus breaching one of the Copenhagen criteria.

The mission found “credible” the allegations that surfaced during the campaign that some public servants were under pressure to vote for the ruling party. An investigation by journalists last month raised suspicions of a large scale government scheme to bully civil servants into providing votes for the ruling party.

OSCE/ODIHR said that the accuracy of the electoral roll remains a matter of concern despite previous efforts to clean up the list of voters.

The OSCE /ODIHR mission provided the majority of the foreign election monitors, over 300 people.

Macedonia’s largest local monitoring group, the civil society association MOST, also came out with largely positive remarks for the voting process. MOST provided several thousand monitors and covered over 70 per cent of the polling stations in the country.

“The voting went off in a calm and democratic manner with increased turnout,” said Darko Aleksov, MOST’s head.

MOST pinpointed several shortcomings, such as the premature start of the election campaign and partially nontransparent political party financing.

Aleksov expressed regret that the campaign featured a large degree of political polarization among people,  negative campaigning and hate speech from politicians, and the use of children and adolescents in the campaign.