The Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev announced his resignation Sunday evening after the poor results of his party, the SDSM (left), in the municipal elections in this small landlocked country in the Balkans.
“
I take responsibility for these election results.
I am resigning from my post as Prime Minister,
”Zoran Zaev told reporters.
Read alsoWhy Bulgaria does not want North Macedonia to join the European Union
In this election, the second round of which was held this Sunday, the SDSM lost the capital Skopje and most of the country's major cities and urban centers after having, in 2017, won more than half of the 80 municipalities of Macedonia in the North.
“
I brought freedom and democracy, and democracy implies taking responsibility,
” Zaev said.
Elected Prime Minister in 2017, he put an end to ten reigns of Nikola Gruevski and his right-wing party the VMRO-DPMNE, shaken by a scandal of illegal wiretapping seeming to testify to rampant corruption.
In 2018, Zaev reached an agreement with Athens that resolved a dispute with Greece over the name of Macedonia, and providing for adding the qualification "
North
" to the name of the country in order to avoid confusion with the
name of Macedonia.
Greek province with the same name.
The conclusion of this agreement should in principle open the door to the country's accession negotiations with the European Union.
But North Macedonia subsequently encountered reluctance from France and Bulgaria, and has still not started these negotiations.
The government of Mr. Zaev has not been spared by business, which probably explains in part the result of the municipal elections.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/C4JE3LB6ZJWHFQWKTFD4Y3SAQE.jpg)
