Doctor Darko Vasilevski has announced a hunger strike. Not over pay, not over a collective agreement - but because he has been rejected for a third time in a public recruitment competition, and he says the reason is his age.

The vacancy is specific: public competition 01/2026 for two medical doctors on permanent contracts, at the Institute of Medical and Experimental Physiology with Anthropology at the Skopje Faculty of Medicine, part of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University. Vasilevski sent an open letter to the faculty's dean's office, to the Ministry of Health and to the Ministry of Education.

What he says about the procedure itself is the most concrete part of the whole story. The notification about the selected candidates, he says, arrived by email - with no instructions on appeal and no explanation of the criteria on which the others were chosen.

The two sentences without which there is no competition

If that is accurate, then the problem need not be age at all. An appeal instruction means the candidate knows where and within what deadline he can object. An explanation means he knows what he lost on. Without those two elements the procedure is formally complete and substantively unreadable - and an unreadable procedure can neither be defended nor challenged.

Vasilevski says that on his first application back in 2022 he was told he was "too old" and that he did not belong there, and that four years later, for the same post, his age came up again. That is his claim and it stands as such until the faculty responds. "Age is not a criterion for employment, it is grounds for discrimination," he writes in the letter.

"I am not asking for any privileges. I am asking for an equal opportunity. I am asking for a fair procedure, for work to be valued, for equal conditions, clear criteria and a transparent process in which knowledge, expertise, professional experience and achievements determine the choice," the letter states.

And there is the quiet backdrop. Macedonia has spent years losing doctors to jobs abroad, while institutions complain routinely about staff shortages. When a specialist who paid out of his own pocket for his training is turned away from a competition three times with no explanation of why - that is a data point about the system, regardless of whether his own explanation for the reason is correct.

The answer that is missing right now is a single, simple one: on what criteria were the two successful candidates chosen? That is not confidential information - it is the content of every public competition. Until that sentence exists, a hunger strike is the only tool left to the man asking for it.