How North Macedonia’s Promising New Left Became a Hateful Chauvinist Party
North Macedonia’s Levica party looked like a new hope for the Left in the former Yugoslav state. But a controversial takeover of the party has split its original leadership group — and taken it toward hateful chauvinism against the country’s Albanian minority.
Opposition supporters protest against the proposal to end the conflict between North Macedonia and Bulgaria and open EU accession negotiations, as they gather outside of the parliament in Skopje, North Macedonia on July 16, 2022. (Robert Atanasovski / AFP via Getty Images)
Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the Left has long been a weak force in North Macedonia’s politics. The newly independent state was dominated by the center-right Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) and the center-left Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM). But in the 2020 parliamentary elections there was a breakthrough for Levica (the Left), a party born five years previously, which elected its first two MPs — Dimitar Apasiev and Borislav Krmov. The news seemed hopeful. Yet all is not as it seems.
Apasiev’s public interventions in recent years have often used a profanity-filled rhetoric starkly different from mainstream Macedonian politicians — appealing to some voters precisely because of its perceived edginess. One vulgar interaction owed to disagreements with President Stevo Pendarovski over the so-called French Proposal — a move to unblock Bulgarian grievances and allow North Macedonia to begin talks on joining the European Union. Apasiev, a vocal opponent of the proposal, wrote “Pendarovski, fuck your mother” on his Facebook page — even though the president’s mother has been dead for ten years. In turn, the president said in a press conference that only “a person who has something missing in his head or is high could say something like that”, and proceeded to call Apasiev a “psychopath.”
Yet Apasiev’s vulgarity also has a deeper political significance. Today, such nationalist posturing feeds wider allegations of racism against Apasiev, who has often directed his attacks against ethnically Albanian politicians. Albanians are the largest minority group in North Macedonia, estimated to make up almost one-quarter of the population. Apasiev urged ethnic Macedonians to boycott the long-awaited 2021 census — the first in nearly two decades — claiming that “This is a census that every patriot MUST boycott — in order for it not to pass. All previous censuses were boycotted by Albanians, now it is Macedonians’ turn to boycott it.”
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