PHOTO: Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters. North Macedonia will face a presidential runoff in May after turnout was too low for Stevo Pendarovski or Gordana Siljanovska Davkova to win outright.
On Sunday, April 21, citizens of North Macedonia went to the polls to elect their new president.
With record low turn-out preventing any candidate winning outright on a first round on Sunday, the showdown between pro-EU and nationalist forces intensified as frontrunners Stevo Pendarovski and Gordana Siljanovska turned to courting ethnic Albanian voters ahead of a run-off on 5 May. After coming in third with 11%, the minority’s preferred candidate, Blerim Reka, was forced out of the race.
On Monday, with 99.96% of the votes counted, North Macedonia’s electoral commission announced that Stevo Pendarovski and Gordana Siljanovska were within a hair’s breadth of each other.
Pendarovski, an ardent supporter of the name change deal that has sealed de facto NATO membership for North Macedonia and paved the way for EU accession talks, held a lead with 42.85% or 323,846 votes. He was backed by the social democrat government and its junior ethnic Albanian partner, the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI).
Siljanovska, the first woman to run for president since the former Yugoslav Republic claimed independence in the early 1990s, garnered 42.24%, or 319,240 votes. Backed by the conservative opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, she vowed to contest the name change agreement before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague.
Because overall turnout remained only at 41.8% and North Macedonia’s electoral law requires a candidate to win support from 50% plus one vote of its 1.8 million electorate, a runoff has been called and the second round of elections will take place in May.
Northern Macedonia, previously known as the Republic of Macedonia, agreed to the new name to appease Greece’s long-held fears of possible irredentist claims against its own adjacent province of Macedonia. In exchange, Greece dropped objections to its northern neighbor joining NATO and the EU.
BY MSEAP Cyber Secretariat (mseap@assembly.go.kr) |
