Macedonia Has Provided a Blueprint for the Balkans

Macedonian PM and SDSM leader Zoran Zaev celebrated the election victory with his party teammates and supporters in Skopje. Photo: MIA

The recent municipal elections in Macedonia represent the completion of a full rotation of what we might term a cycle of social change. That is, the journey from political crisis to response to resolution. And, in that regard, these events are an important example for the rest of the region.

Let us review what has just taken place and what the Macedonian people have accomplished over the last three years. To be clear, it is the Macedonian people who have won this opportunity for a genuine democratic revolution in the country; not the Social Democratic Party of Macedonia, SDSM, not the international community, but ordinary Macedonian citizens.

The revelation of a program of mass surveillance in 2015 by the then government of Nikola Gruevski and his VMRO-DPMNE party was scandalous. But in the grand canon of Balkan statesmanship it was hardly without precedent.

Political blackmail, media repression, and state-sanctioned violence against government critics are more or less the norm across most of the region. Granted, the scale of the program in Macedonia was shocking: as many as 20,000 citizens were reportedly put under surveillance. Yet as in so many similar cases, scandal does not automatically translate to regime change. If it did, men who are now in their third decade of political life would, by rights, be footnotes in the region’s history.

What happened in Macedonia was not that someone merely revealed gross wrongdoing by the government; it is that the public insisted on consequences, and their own mobilization and agency convinced the opposition to truly take up the torch of total regime change and social transformation. The Macedonian citizens realized, for themselves, the promise of democratic accountability and institutional integrity.

Thus, the key events in Macedonia’s recent history are not so much the respective elections, as they are the respective popular uprisings – from the student plenums to the Colorful Revolution. Indeed, the elections have but cemented that which the people had already demonstrated: the determination to attempt a new course.

And the results of these popular revolts have been stark: VMRO-DPMNE has now lost two elections in a row (the second by a far bigger margin than the first), the new government has decisively rebooted Macedonia’s EU and NATO accession paths, improved relations with Bulgaria and Greece, replenished the ranks of the country’s political and administrative apparatus with fresh, young leaders, and has taken steps towards restoring meaningful dialogue between the ethnic Macedonian and Albanian communities.

Each of these accomplishments is still tentative, reversals remain possible, and Macedonian civil society will have to ensure that the new SDSM-led government does not replicate the tendencies of its predecessors. But that is itself, perhaps, the biggest accomplishment of all: that Macedonian civil society has become a deciding political factor in the country’s governance. This, after all, is the true mark of a functional democratic regime: a vibrant and effective culture of participation, dissent, and protest.

There’s another import point to consider for activists and reform oriented policymakers in the region, and Europe more broadly. This whole series of events occurred pretty much exactly as scholars and analysts of social movements have written about for decades.

In short, an initial catalyst begat a broader reaction, which, once it attained sufficient mass, radically transformed the broader political calculus in society, forcing segments of the elite to fracture away from the existing regime and throw their weight behind the new movement, thus propelling the latter to victory.

This is not to say that the international community played no role in this process. The intervention of the US State Department, for instance, certainly convinced the VMRO-DPMNE leadership to finally accept that they had truly lost power. But while the US may have helped push the cart across the finish line – with the EU, in typical fashion, reduced to a bystander role in a moment of acute crisis – the race was run and won by the Macedonian citizens themselves.

Now, as noted, there may, or may not be, be future reversals of Macedonia’s current fortunes. However, that will not affect the thesis that democratic change requires popular mobilization and grassroots, civil society participation. It will merely confirm that politics, especially in real democratic societies, is a perpetual exercise, one that requires continuous affirmation and revival. If we sink into despotism, it is because we have allowed ourselves to be ruled in such a fashion.

As a result, the only relevant question for the rest of the Western Balkans is how long we shall wait to replicate the strategies and successes of our Macedonian cousins? Conditions in Sarajevo and Belgrade are no better (and may well be worse) than those that once prevailed in Skopje. And, although we should never have doubted it in the first place, we now know definitively that the actions ordinary people can have extraordinary consequences.

In truth, all that we lack – all that Balkan civil society has ever lacked – is the courage to try and perhaps, still more importantly, to try again.

Dr Jasmin Mujanović is a political scientist specialising in the politics of southeastern Europe and the politics of post-authoritarian and post-conflict democratisation. His first book, “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans” is now available for pre-order from Hurst Publishers.

The opinions expressed in the Comment section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonian-has-provided-a-blueprint-for-the-balkans-10-19-2017