Former health minister Filipce elected North Macedonia’s opposition leader

North Macedonia’s Socialist SDSM party elected Venko Filipce as its new leader on Sunday.

Some 9,052 party members voted for Filipce, who will become the new opposition leader. He currently sits as an MP.

Filipce served as health minister from 2017 to 2022. Despite the fact that he was very popular during the coronavirus pandemic, his tenure was marked by a fire in a hospital in Tetovo that claimed the lives of 14 people.

In his victory speech, Filipce said that now is the time for the party’s “renewal”. Faced with demotivated membership, a splinter party and a very strong government majority in parliament, his goal remains all the more elusive.

The leadership race was called after the resignation of Kovacevski, which followed the party’s worst result in its history. The Social Democrats received around 150,000 votes and only 18 parliamentary seats in the elections in North Macedonia, held on 8 May this year.

Filipce is a very close ally of North Macedonia’s ex- Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who signed the landmark Prespa Agreement with Greece’s ex-PM Alexis Tsipras. After leaving office, Zaev and Filipce founded ‘ZAEV Foundation’.

Both Zaev and Filipce praised the Prespa Agreement in Athens two weeks ago at the Alexis Tsipras Institute Conference that marked six years since the signing of the agreement.

His nearest contender with roughly 2,700 votes was Jovan Despotovski, who unsuccessfully ran for the party leadership in 2021, too. Aleksandar Bajdevski, the third candidate, won 905 votes.

Despotovski strongly disputed the results tonight, claiming that more than 10,000 members were prevented from voting.

The fourth candidate in the race, former defense minister Slavjanka Petrovska announced on Saturday that she is withdrawing from the race, citing her serious concerns about the election’s legitimacy as the reason for her decision.

Petrovska alleged that one of the other candidates misused the personal data of thousands of party members.  As she is a sitting SDSM MP, her future cooperation with the new leader remains unclear.

In spite of his resounding victory, Filipce faces the immediate challenge of his demotivated membership. Out of approximately 84,000 party members, around 13,000 took part in the leadership election.

His predecessor and former prime minister Dimitar Kovacevski was elected in December of 2021 with more than 37,000 votes, while roughly 44,000 members turned out to vote. Just nine months before that, Zoran Zaev was re-elected as party leader with the support of about 59,000 members.

Luka Pavikjevikj is a summer intern at Kathimerini English Edition, and a second-year college student at Harvard University.