Afterword

Three years on from the completion of this analysis, the political climate in Macedonia has become even less conducive to decentralisation’s success. Relations between governing and opposition parties have become increasingly polarised, a trend exacerbated by the forced removal of opposition SDSM MPs from the parliamentary chamber in December 2012 during a disagreement over the size of the forthcoming year’s state budget. SDSM has boycotted Parliament ever since national elections were held in April 2014, the outcome of which they and other opposition parties consider to be fraudulent (Fouéré 2015). The results of municipal elections in March and April 2013 also illustrate the increasing dominance of the two main governing parties (VMRO-DPMNE and DUI) at the expense of the opposition. VMRO-DPMNE and DUI now control almost 90 per cent of all municipalities (up from 82.4 per cent in 2009), while the number of SDSM opposition-controlled municipalities has fallen from six to four. ¹ The increasing marginalisation of opposition parties in local as well as national politics means that the municipal association ZELS continues to be dominated by mayors representing central government-aligned municipalities. No doubt as a consequence of this, ZELS has not prepared its annual ‘Systematised Positions’ (a formal list of municipal demands to central government) since December 2011.