Penov: Populism Is Still Present in Local Governments

“In the European Union, 70 percent of European policies, directives and guidelines are
implemented through local self-government, which means that this segment is quite strongly
expressed among them. In our country, although we are legally a functionally decentralized
state, our problem is financial decentralization, where even after 18 years, 70 percent of the
municipalities’s income is state subsidies, and populism is strongly present in the local self-
government, so they don’t want to charge for the right services,” emphasized Minister of
Local Self-Government Risto Penov at coffee-debate in Skopje, organized by the European
Movement (EMMK) on the topic “Local initiatives for global steps”.