On Monday night, in an interview with the 360 Stepeni (360 Degrees) show, broadcast on MTV1, PM and VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski said his assessment was that the coalition led by his party would win more mayoral seats in the upcoming elections than it had in the 2021 local polls.
“According to our analyses, we will not be surprised if we win more than 50 mayoral seats, but the expected number is between 45 and 50, in addition to the capital, the City of Skopje”, he stated.
Asked how many mayoral seats SDSM would win according to VMRO-DPMNE’s analyses, Mickoski stated that Venko Filipce’s party would win 0-6 mayoral races. The same episode included also an interview with the SDSM leader. Asked about the upcoming local elections, Filipce stated that his party would run in all municipalities with the same level of energy and enthusiasm.
“Where there are SDSM mayors, the fight will be for another term. When there aren’t SDSM mayors, there is a huge increase in the energy, desire, and wish for political fight of our members and sympathisers. We’ve heard the announcements, the fake polls by VMRO-DPMNE that support for SDSM is very low. That’s an absolute falsehood. I consider they’re panicking due to the fall of their ratings, which is confirmed to us by our polls”, he stressed, adding that VMRO-DPMNE had lost around 100,000 votes since the start of the new, central, government’s term.
Earlier that day, Mickoski, during a visit to Gradsko, had stated that the local polls would see citizens face two options: the coalition led by his party and the SDSM-DUI-Levica one.
According to him, a third option doesn’t exist, despite the fact that there are tens of independent candidates. In that regard, the VMRO-DPMNE leader described ex-PM and former PM Zoran Zaev as the “guru in the background” of the SDSM-DUI-Levica coalition.
However, in response to his comments, Filipce emphasised that SDSM was in a coalition with neither DUI nor Dimitar Apasiev’s party.
“In the local elections, the citizens will choose between the pro-European SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE’s policy of blockades”, he stressed.
Filipce levelled criticism also at VMRO-DPMNE’s coalition partner, ZNAM, referring to Maksim Dimitrievski’s party as “decoration” within the ruling structure. According to him, members of that party are silent for reasons related to personal interests, in addition to being servile to VMRO-DPMNE.
However, ZNAM responded by saying that the leader of the opposition party, during his term as the Minister of Health, had been synonymous with crime and misuse.
In that regard, Dimitrievski’s party underlined that there had been, during Filipce’s term as member of the previous ruling structure, scandalous tenders and kickbacks in the health sector, as well as unimplemented and non-transparent projects such as the one for the clinical centre.