DUI official in charge of European integration Bujar Osmani said that his party will nominate a joint presidential candidate with its coalition partner SDS. According to Osmani, it is time to have a “consensual candidate” with the SDS who are today essentially functioning as one political party.
DUI so far hasn’t insisted that the candidate ought to be ethnic Albanian. DUI proposed Yugoslav era professor Denko Maleski, strong lobbyist for a name change, who was Macedonia’s first Foreign Affairs Minister in the early 1990s, when he famously opposed Macedonia’s independence. For DUI, Maleski is the perfect candidate as he’s been anti-Macedonian for decades.
The SDS still hasn’t made a counter-proposal, and although Zoran Zaev said he will not run, and everyone knows his word is solid as a rock, many are expecting Jess Baily to nominate the SDS leader for president.
Osmani left the door open to holding early general elections along with the presidential elections in April, when President Gjorge Ivanov’s second term expires. Osmani said that holding early general elections, which is the request of the main opposition party DP-NE, may cause a disruption in the work to win the approval to open EU accession talks, but…
If we are blackmailed, in the sense that there would be an opposition boycott of the presidential elections, which would cause a crisis of our institutions and then generate an even greater disruption in the EU integrations dynamic, then we would have to sit down and think about it, said Osmani.
