Vitaly Portnikov. Winners: Stoyan Andov

Winners: Stoyan Andov
Vitaly Portnikov

Publication date: December 4, 2000

65-year-old Stoyan Andov, the first chairman of the parliament of independent Macedonia , returned to this post after a four-year break. He returned, although there were no parliamentary elections: the election of Andov as chairman of the Assembly of Macedonia drew a line under the existence of one government coalition and the creation of another. At the center of this coalition is still the VMRO-DPMNE party of Prime Minister Ljupco Georgievski; ministers from the Democratic Party of Albanians also remain in the government. But representatives of the Democratic Alternative (DA) party of former Deputy Prime Minister Vasil Tupurkovsky left the government and joined the opposition. The Speaker of Parliament, DA representative Savo Klimovski, was also forced to resign from his post. The West reacted with lightning speed to the creation of a new coalition. Prime Minister Georgievsky met with the ambassadors of France, Great Britain and the European Union, who expressed support for the new coalition. Vasil Tupurkovsky was outraged and accused the West of conspiring against him. But the point is probably, first of all, that the coalition with Andov looks more solid than the bloc with Tupurkovsky.

Stoyan Andov is one of the most experienced politicians in Macedonia and one of the few current representatives of the elite who can boast of activity at the federal level: in the government of the SFRY Andov was at one time a minister without portfolio, then he was appointed Ambassador of Yugoslavia in Baghdad. Andov was very close to the Yugoslav reformer prime minister Ante Markovic and upon his return to Macedonia he created a branch of his party, the Alliance of Democratic Forces, here. In the 1990 parliamentary elections, held before Macedonian independence was declared, this party, soon renamed the Liberal Party of Macedonia, won 18 seats in parliament. Andov was elected chairman of the Assembly of Macedonia. For a long time he actively collaborated with the post-communists - the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia. In 1994, SDSM, liberals and socialists created the Alliance for Macedonia electoral bloc, which won the next parliamentary elections. Andov again became the Chairman of the Assembly, but already in 1996 the coalition collapsed. The former partners explained their divorce as a whole complex of political and economic differences, but many observers were inclined to consider it an irritation of the SDSM due to Andov's growing popularity. In October 1995, after a still unsolved assassination attempt on the country's president, Kiro Gligorov, Andov became acting head of state - and handled these responsibilities so effectively that immediately after Gligorov's recovery, the post-communists considered it necessary to elect their representative, Tito, to the post of speaker Petkovsky, a future candidate for the post of president of the country.

Before the 1998 elections, the Liberal Democratic Party of Andova tried to partner with VMRO-DPMNE. But the future ruling party preferred Tupurkovsky’s Demalternative. The promises of Tupurkovsky, who even during his tenure as a member of the presidiums of the Central Committee of the SKYU and the SFRY became famous as an experienced businessman, were much more attractive. Tupurkovsky proposed recognizing Taiwan, which would then pay for it with “golden showers.” Liberals objected strongly. Today, when no money has arrived from Taipei and the Macedonian government can only count on Europe, VMRO-DPMNE is much more profitable to deal with Andov than with Tupurkovsky. Tupurkovsky’s resignation makes it possible to explain to voters why the Taiwanese millions did not appear: he, they say, deceived us too...

In the 1998 parliamentary elections, the LDP won only 4 seats in parliament. A year later, Andov ran for president - and performed unsuccessfully. They began to talk about the decline of his political career, but the Macedonian elite is not so large and there is always room for maneuver. Now the party with 4 mandates received the post of Speaker of the Assembly and 3 ministerial positions. True, the posts of ministers of foreign affairs and economics vacated by the “alternatives” went not to the liberals who claimed them, but to the Democratic Party of Albanians. (Its representative, former ambassador to Germany Serjan Kerim, became the first ethnic Albanian foreign minister of Macedonia.) The positions the liberals received suggest that their task is to give more respectability to the government. Like all former revolutionaries and dissidents, the leaders of VMRO-DPMNE and DPA, having become accustomed to power, seek to replace populism with gloss and Western standards. Why shouldn't seasoned veteran Stoyan Andov exploit this desire?