Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter takes the crisis and fall of the Gruevski government in Macedonia between 2015 and 2017 to understand the conditions under which the competitive regimes in the Western Balkans can be challenged.

Epilogue

Dear Balkan Prince,

You read my previous notes (see Introduction), then you engaged some foreign advisers (Bieber 2015) to make yourself look good internationally, and then you hired some domestic advisers (Vasić 2014) to show you how to play dirty. However, you never called and offered me the possibility to provide you with more assistance.

I have thus decided to provide some advice for those who might be seeking to replace you. As I wrote back then, your job is dancing on the edge of a volcano. Good luck to those who seek to replace you and hopefully will not become just another prince:

• 1. It is difficult. It is harder than challenging classic authoritarian rule. Srđa Popović provides some good and humorous advice on toppling today’s dictators, but much of it does not work in removing the Balkan prince (2015).

• 2. Getting them caught. The ‘eleventh’ rule for the Balkan prince is ‘Don’t get caught’, a key lesson for those seeking to remove them. Much of the mechanisms of staying in power rely on everybody knowing them, suspecting them, but lacking hard evidence beyond personal anecdotes. Hearing your Prince and his aids talking about citizens like cattle, manipulating elections, courts, media, and threatening the opposition is potentially destabilizing (Macedonia Watch 2015).

• 3. The Balkan prince is often quite popular and thrives on mobilizing a supposed ‘silent majority’. The prince will often use populism to make sure that he has strong backing and he will campaign continuously. To challenge him, you need to show the citizens that he does not have the ‘silent’ majority behind him. Just basing opposition on one group (i.e., students and city dwellers) will not be sufficient to build a strong movement.

• 4. Reclaiming the public. The Balkan prince will control the media, not through direct censorship, but subtle pressure (controlling media through advertisement, targeted pressure). To challenge the prince, you need to create a public sphere, and the Internet won’t do, as its reach does not get to the citizens who are the most loyal voters.

• 5. Challenge external support for the Balkan prince. The power of the Balkan prince rests on external legitimacy. As long as external actors, such as the EU, remain silent or lack a clear language, the power of the prince to claim of external legitimacy will help him. In fact, he might use this to discredit the opposition and present himself as the only guarantor of stability and Euro-Atlantic integration. To challenge the Balkan prince, make sure to secure external backing, but careful too much backing might make you vulnerable to accusations that you are a foreign agent.

• 6. Offer an alternative. The Balkan prince will be happy with the message that everybody is the same, equally corrupt, power-hungry. As long as citizens believe that there is no fundamental difference, why chose new leaders, they will steal even more than those who already have stolen enough.

• 7. Don’t accept his terms of the debate. He will seek to convince the public that he is more patriotic than you and more reformist and more European than you. Don’t try to be more patriotic (i.e., nationalist) than him. Change the framework to one you can win (unemployment, poverty).

• 8. Pick winnable and popular battles. As Srđa Popović notes, it is important to pick a battle with the prince you can win and that can energize the public.

• 9. Win elections. The only credible place to defeat the Balkan prince is elections. As their rule claims to be democratic, it is difficult to challenge them in social protests alone. Without an electoral challenge, they can wait out protests and win elections. While the prince has made it harder to defeat him, he still has to win them and has limited leeway in manipulating them.

• 10. Block the ethnic card. Balkan princes will want to play the ethnic card, antagonize and polarize to shift attention away from the real issues. You need to challenge the ethnic card, not trump it. This means building cross-ethnic coalitions and recognizing that most citizens don’t care much about ethnicity, given a chance.

To the challengers of the Balkan prince, good luck, and don’t forget to not use the powers you might inherit for your own advantage, they are tempting. If you do, you will become just another Balkan prince.

(Bieber 2015)

So far, of autocratic rulers discussed in this book the only ‘Balkan Prince’ to lose power has been Nikola Gruevski and his ruling Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization—Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) in Macedonia. The end of his regime was a long and protracted process that highlighted the entrenched nature of these regimes. It ended with the fall of the government in 2017 and the conviction of Gruevski himself for ordering a 600,000 euro Mercedes he used for private purposes—hardly the most serious abuse of office, but one that could be proven. Following the confirmation of his verdict, Gruevski fled to safety with another autocrat, Viktor Orbán in Hungary (Marusic 2018).

The ‘Macedonian moment’ (Bieber 2017) occurred in 2017, when a new government led by the social democrat Zoran Zaev replaced the 12-year rule of VMRO-DPMNE. Besides ending the political crisis that had resulted from the massive abuse of office, the new government seized the opportunity to improve neighborly relations by signing a friendship agreement with Bulgaria and settling the name dispute with Greece, as well as re-energizing reforms and Euro-Atlantic integration. This shift only became possible through a complex set of circumstances—and is by no means secure.

It began in the year 2014, which was a low point. It was the supposed endpoint of the gigantic urban redesign project Skopje 2014, which had been launched out of the blue five years earlier and had transformed the city center with fountains, bridges, new facades, and buildings squeezed along the Vardar River to hide the old Ottoman bazaar from view. Still, the revamp continued, as the ruling party’s control seemed absolute. In early elections in April that year, its candidate for the presidency, Gjorge Ivanov, won a controversial second term after most Albanian parties, including the junior government partner DUI, called for a boycott, arguing that VMRO-DPMNE had not offered a consensual candidate. Early parliamentary elections were held simultaneously with the second round of presidential elections. The elections were a resounding success for the ruling party. VMRO-DPMNE gathered 44.47 percent of the vote and 61 of 123 seats in parliament. While it lacked only one seat for an outright majority, it continued its marriage of convenience with the Albanian junior partner, the Democratic Union for Integration (BDI), despite their boycott of the presidential elections.

The opposition was dispirited, as the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) had gathered only 26.22 percent of the vote, giving it 34 seats, losing out in comparison with the previous election when it began to close the gap with the ruling party. The new head of the party, Zoran Zaev, seemed to be unable to mount an effective challenge the government.

At the same time, the elections were marked by serious irregularities. The OSCE report noted vote-buying and pressure on civil servants and citizens to vote for the ruling coalition and not to attend opposition rallies (OSCE/ODIHR 2014, 14). Besides, the media coverage strongly favored the incumbent through a combination of pressure, self-censorship, and bias (OSCE/ODIHR 3), leading to the results that fall in line with the authoritarian patterns discussed in this book. In response to the irregularities, the MPs from the coalition led by the social democrats (except for three) decided to resign their seats.

A boycott has become a common strategy in the region, particularly in Macedonia, but also in neighboring Albanian and Montenegro. While it can serve as a dramatic tool to underline the democratic shortcomings of parliament, if overused it can be self-defeating. Consequently, international observers have seen boycotts as the reflection of a political dispute between governing and opposition parties, not focusing so much on the deep institutional flaws that triggered it in Macedonia, not to mention a crisis of democracy.

In 2014, the resignations were unable to limit the power of the Gruevski government, as 89 of 123 MPs remained in parliament—more than two-thirds—reducing the opposition resignations to a purely symbolic step. Internationally, it also failed to draw enough attention to change power dynamics.

Had there not been the ‘bombs’, the thousands of recordings by the intelligence agency made at the behest of the Gruevski government and leaked to the opposition by Gjorgi Lazarevski, a former intelligence officer, not much would have changed (Jovanovski 2017). As Zaev released the recordings at regular intervals in much-awaited press conferences, Macedonian citizens could hear Prime Minister Gruevski, his cousin Sašo Mijalkov, head of the intelligence agency, and various ministers discussing election fraud, pressuring the media and judges, mocking opponents, and showing disdain for democracy and institutions. The revelations led to a series of protests: first a tent city in front of government in 2015, and then the ‘colorful revolution’ that literally colored many of the institutions of the government, especially those (re-)built as part of the Skopje 2014 project, by throwing paint at them. The protests were multiethnic and did not only include supporters of the opposition. This social movement worked closely with the opposition but also included checks to ensure that the struggle for democracy would not be short-circuited.

However, neither the revelations nor the protests would have led to change of government on their own. The protests were ignored in the loyal press or described as a rabble. The EU only gradually understood the dispute as not merely a conflict between government and opposition, but over democracy. A crucial turning point was the dispatch of an expert group led by Reinhard Priebe. The former European Commission director and a number of legal experts visited Macedonia and issued a report in June 2015 that clearly identified all the shortcomings in terms of the rule of law and democracy that the government needed to remedy (Senior Experts’ Group 2015). The report was released in parallel with the EU-mediated Pržino Agreement, which outlined a way out of the crisis for the opposition and the government, including the resignation of Gruevski, the establishment of a caretaker government, and early elections, as well as the establishment of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate the allegations. Despite delays, the special prosecutor’s office, led by three women soon known as ‘Charlie’s Angels’, took on the difficult cases and indicted, among others, Gruevski himself. The interim government, led by Emil Dimitriev, took over from Gruevski in January 2016. Early elections were held after some delays in December 2016. The results were inconclusive. While VMRO-DPMNE remained the larger party, with 39.39 percent of the vote, the opposition SDSM gained nearly the same level of support, with 37.87 percent, and the government formation hinged on the Albanian parties. Government formation was difficult, as the main Albanian party DUI had lost considerable support and was tainted by its association with the VMRO-DPMNE. In this situation, President Ivanov sought to influence the government formation in his party’s favor by rejecting a coalition composed by other parties. When the SDSM, the DUI, and smaller Albanian parties agreed to form a ruling coalition, the first step was the election of the speaker of parliament. When Talat Xhaferi was elected speaker of parliament—he had served as minister of defense under Gruevski—some 200 thugs were let into parliament by MPs of the formerly ruling party. These nationalist protesters attacked MPs and injured several members of the newly established government majority.

The violence in parliament was a turning point that prompted stronger international pressure, including by the US, which helped secure the election of the new government that took over just over a month later in late May 2017. With the change of government, the crisis that began in 2014/2015 came to a conclusion, the building of Skopje 2014 came to a halt, and the investigation of past abuses accelerated. However, while this ended the autocratic rule of the Gruevski government, its legacy lingers on. The new government swiftly sought to improve relations with its neighbors, which had soured over the previous decade. Following a friendship agreement with Bulgaria, it concluded the Prespa Agreement in June 2018 with Greece, resolving the 27-year-old name dispute. The agreement was a precondition for joining NATO and the EU and thus a priority for the government. Implementing the agreement posed a serious challenge, as VMRO-DPMNE, now in opposition, sought to obstruct a settlement. This resulted in the failure of a consultative referendum in September 2018 and a tight vote for constitutional amendments in October 2018 and January 2019. Securing support in parliament required the vote of MPs who had been tainted by their past involvement in autocratic practices. The Prespa Agreement came into force in early 2019 after both the Greek and the Macedonian parliaments successfully ratified the agreement. This ended the name dispute and created the potential for potting the dispute not just to rest, but also reducing the opportunities for it to become a convenient excuse for authoritarian leaders. The change of government and the efforts made by the new leadership to break with the previous government are only the beginning in tackling the challenges of weak democracies. A competitive authoritarian regime lost power, but institutions remain weak and patterns of patronage and nepotism are too entrenched to be uprooted overnight.

As this book has argued, the rise of autocrats in the Western Balkans is strongly predicted by structural features that do not simply disappear when a particular president or prime minister loses office. The informal authoritarian patterns have become strongly embedded, with officials—judges, civil servants, and journalists—looking to those in power for signs of what is acceptable and desired. Breaking this pattern requires more than a change of government. In addition, the polarized nature of the political sphere can easily replace those who held all power in their hands, with those excluded from power now taking their revenge and thus replicating the pattern. Overcoming the different legacies of autocratic rule might also be contradictory: for the new Macedonian government, moving beyond the polarization with Greece over the name incited by the previous government might result in a compromise on the rule of law. The legacies of autocratic rule are not easily undone.

Looking back, the opposition in Macedonia managed to challenge the ‘Balkan Prince’ on all of the ten points I identified earlier. It took massive revelations on the abuse of office, strong social movements, international mediation, an election, and then a serious level of violence, threatening the lives of opposition leaders, to bring about change.

While mass rallies against the Macedonian government helped the opposition to mobilize and eventually gain power, they were not sufficient. The regimes are able to mobilize their own supporters, and they are not just the scared, coerced, and confused masses that Slobodan Milošević bussed to Belgrade in 1996/1997 to counter the mass rallies against his vote theft. Of course, this is not the only path to end this type of government, but competitive authoritarian systems are firmly entrenched. Some of the weaker examples may eventually collapse due to an unexpected electoral defeat, an unusually independent prosecutor or judge, or a strong social movement. However, considering the regimes’ reliance on formal electoral majorities, control of institutions and media, and external support, these foundations are not easily shaken. Protests movements have emerged in several countries discussed in this book in late 2018 and 2019, including Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Kosovo and Albanian. Their specific gestation varies, but they all reflect a strong sense of dissatisfaction of citizens with the state of democracy and rule of law. They shared some features with the protests in Macedonia. This does not mean that the Macedonian experience easily matches on the other countries. In Serbia and Montenegro, the opposition is fragmented and ideologically heterogenous, ranging from liberals to the far-right. Citizens appear to protest not because of the opposition, but rather despite it. With the competitive authoritarian regimes entrenched and relying on considerable resources to hold voters captive, democratic transformation is difficult.