The campaign for the second round of the local elections has continued. At a mini-rally in Valandovo, VMRO-DPMNE leader and PM Hristijan Mickoski stated that his party’s “convincing” victory in the first round, when it had won 33 mayoral races, was a historic result.
Once again, he criticised the opposition’s “dark campaign”. Regarding the Skopje mayoral race, Mickoski stated that his party’s candidate, Orce Gjorgjievski, had won, in the first round, three times as many as votes his opponent, Levica’s Amar Mecinovic, that is, 92-93 thousand as opposed to 30 thousand.
He also praised the “convincing victory” regarding the City of Skopje Council.
“However, at the same time, we’re expecting the number of votes for Orce Gjorgjievski after the second round to be around 125-130 thousand”, he stressed.
SDSM leader Venko Filipce, during a visit to Aerodrom, said there would be staff changes within the leadership of the party after the end of the local elections. That, he added, will happen due to results in the first round, especially in some municipalities in Skopje.
However, Filipce stated that his party had faced pressures before the vote in municipalities where it had endorsed mayoral candidates in the form of financial controls, through social works centres, and offers of money in exchange for votes.
“We’ve notified relevant institutions of that. Due to that, we were working in difficult conditions”, the SDSM leader noted.
The respective campaign activities by Gjorgjievski and Mecinovic, as well as those by the candidates in the Centar mayoral race, SDSM’s Goran Gerasimovski and ZNAM’s Centar Labudovic, continued to focus on the waste situation. VMRO-DPMNE’s candidate stated that cleanup activities had continued.
“Since early this morning, together with my future counterparts from Centar and Karpos [Labudovic and VMRO-DPMNE-endorsed Sotir Lukrovski, respectively], and with the support of Stip, Veles, Kavadarci, and Kumanovo Municipalities, we’ve been at the most critical locations where there are landfills”, he stressed, adding that activities would continue in order for there to be a thorough cleanup of multiple parts of the capital.
Residents of Skopje mustn’t be victims of inefficiency of PEs, Gjorgjievski underlined. Mecinovic, on his part, described the waste situation as the most absurd one in the capital’s history.
In his view, it has been the result of the collapse of the local self-government that has since 2021 been in the hands of VMRO-DPMNE. Among Levica’s projects, he explained, is one to rehabilitate the Communal Hygiene PE and oppose the idea for a public-private partnership.
In Centar, Gerasimovski, who’s running for a second term, was part of cleanup activities with other citizens, including youth, and hygienists. Previously, he had said the weekend would see a deratisation process carried out in the frames of all schools and kindergartens, while after the elections, there would be repeat disinsection and disinfection activities.
His opponent, Labudovic, stated that the waste situation had escalated, saying the Communal Hygiene PE was to blame for the waste issue and calling on all politicians to use their authority and help solve the problem.