Bitiqi considers returning as SDSM vice-president: "That kind of language isn't normal for a social democrat"

Fatmir Bitiqi, an MP and former deputy prime minister, has revealed that he received an offer to become vice-president of SDSM, Macedonia's main opposition party, once again. It's the post he himself left after the 2024 election defeat. "I'm thinking about it, I'm talking to all sides and very soon I'll talk to the party president again," he said in a television interview.

The offer comes from Venko Filipche at a moment when the party is split. On one side is the leadership; on the other, the "Conversations about the Future 12:05" Platform, a group of former party officials led by Igor Ivanovski, which is demanding the leader's resignation.

Bitiqi calls his relations with Filipche correct and professional. But when he was asked about the leader's language - Filipche called Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski an "idiot" and said he would run over the Platform's members "like a truck over a frog" - Bitiqi didn't hold back. The official position, he said, is that this is a response to the vocabulary Mickoski established. "If you're asking me whether I think that kind of language is normal for a social democrat, I think it isn't," he added.

He proposes that the leadership and the Platform sit down at the same table with no taboo topics, including the demand for Filipche's resignation. But the order, in his view, should be different: first the party's strategic commitments and direction, and only then the people. In another TV appearance he said he hadn't considered sitting at the Platform's table, and that his interest is the party, not the post.

So SDSM starts the autumn with internal score-settling. The leader offers posts, the critics demand his resignation, and a potential vice-president tells his boss in public that he talks like the opponent. Can an opposition that spends its energy on itself lead the fight against the government - the fight everyone in it claims is the priority?