In his interview with Sitel television Sunday, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski invited SDSM leader Branko Crvenkovski to elections to measure the people’s trust, MIA reported Monday.
“Crvenkovski is appealing for early elections and is setting conditions that cannot be met even in six months,” Prime Minister Gruevski said, emphasizing that all opposition demands had been met.
In his view, elections can be held by the present election law as well and based on the present voters’ list considering it has been revised, which has also been confirmed by the president of the State Election Commission, Aleksandar Novakovski.
Gruevski appealed to Crvenkovski to send his MPs back to Parliament as early as today so that the modifications to the election law can be voted through and elections could be held in which, according to the prime minister, it would be seen if his party, VMRO-DPMNE, had the people’s trust.
“My opinion, BDI’s opinion and the opinion of all others from the governing coalition in December was that it was good for this year to be used for reforms, progress, modernization and Euro-Atlantic integration. Considering the current situation and what Crvenkovski is saying that he has no intention of returning to Parliament, he is consciously doing harm to the country. He wishes to harm primarily VMRO-DPMNE and the government in order to regain power. However he is consciously neglecting the fact that he is doing harm to the country.
“I feel responsible to put an end to this and I take this opportunity to appeal to him once again to return to Parliament so we can pass the election law, not to use other tricks to stay out of it, considering we all know that changing the Constitution takes six months and we all know that if he as strong as he says he is, if he believes he can win, he can pass a media law to his liking in the first week of his election. Let us see if it is them or us that work at the people’s peril,” Gruevski said.
As a reaction to Prime Minister Gruevski’s appeal, Jani Makraduli from SDSM said Sunday for A1 television: “After Prime Minister Gruevski rejected our demands for early elections three or four times, and in the meantime tried and is still trying to close A1 television, masterminded with his coalition partners the incident at the Skopje fortress, arrested three or four more men, now he wants elections in this democratic or non-democratic atmosphere. As to what the image of the Republic of Macedonia is, the US Department of State said it best in its press releases. Probably something has changed or he had a change of heart flying over the Atlantic Ocean. SDSM is going to define its position tomorrow. Of course, we are ready to win in the first popular elections. This unpopular regime has to fall in elections. We are going to make our position official tomorrow but SDSM is ready to win whenever the elections are held.”
Andrej Zernovski from LDP told A1 that, “what the prime minister said has been our position for quite some time. We called for reason and called on the leaders of VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM to talk. Obviously there is no agreement between them and if there is no agreement the only solution is early parliamentary elections. As I expected this from Gruevski, now I expect Crvenkovski to accept the elections.”
