The meeting of the leaders of VMRO-DPMNE, SDSM, BDI and Demokracia e Re, Nikola Gruevski, Branko Crvenkovski, Ali Ahmeti and Imer Selmani at President Gjorge Ivanov’s office Tuesday lasted less than an hour and ended without an agreement over the open issues as regards the holding of early parliamentary elections.

Prime Minister and VMRO-DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski said Crvenkovski came to the meeting with the intention to prevent reaching an agreement and holding elections.

This shows that he has no intention of running in the elections, Gruevski said. He also said the government accepted many demands of the opposition but some of them were irrational and illogical.

“We did all we could and our conscience is clean,” Gruevski said, adding that early elections would be held.

SDSM leader Branko Crvenkovski accused Gruevski of having come to the meeting with the intention to make it fail. According to him, the VMRO-DPMNE leader wants elections without the opposition.

Crvenkovski stressed that SDSM were going to continue the boycott of Parliament and would boycott the elections too unless their demands were met.

Although nobody knows the date of the elections yet and Parliament has not yet dissolved, the political parties have long since started the election campaign and fight the political battle for winning votes with all means available. Party spots and leaders’ meetings with citizens have long been shown on TV channels, congresses are being rerun a number of times and newspapers are filled with advertisements as well, Dnevnik says.