The campaign for the presidential and early parliamentary elections ends at the end of the day Friday. However, the issues that have been raised over the past thirty days, the manner in which the battle was fought in both the Macedonian and Albanian political campus and the messages that set the tone of the entire campaign from its very beginning will be discussed for long after polling stations close on Sunday.

As early as at the promotion of presidential candidate Gjorge Ivanov, VMRO-DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski said that in these elections he was not seeking “just” a double victory but 62 parliamentary seats that would give him comfort in the making of the new government. This objective in fact defined the contours of VMRO-DPMNE’s strategy for the election campaign, which set out to fight battles on two fronts – on the one hand against SDSM as the largest opposition party on the other hand against BDI, which, in Gruevski’s words, operates with threats and is obstructing reforms in the country. In result, a great deal of the election campaign of the governing party focused on interethnic issues but with rhetoric that did not help ease interethnic tension.