Mickoski: No Early Elections, the State Has to Find Five Billion Euros in Two Years

"Politically, going to elections suits us." With that sentence Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski opened the topic - and immediately closed it: there will be no early parliamentary elections, because, as he put it, the state has to raise five billion euros over the next two years.

He laid out the numbers at a briefing with journalists. In 2027 the state needs to find 2.3 billion euros, and in 2028 around 2.7 billion - to repay money borrowed during Covid, refinance debts, pay interest and cover the budget deficit. "Six months of a caretaker government will take the country straight into bankruptcy. And that caretaker government would be in place at the height of the harshest winter, in January and possibly part of February," Mickoski said.

According to him, 2028, when regular elections are due, will be easier, because some obligations can be pushed into 2029 - the only year that the previous government, he claims, didn't fill up with Eurobond borrowing. He added that nobody in the international community supports early elections.

Elections as a budget line

The argument sounds responsible, but it has a logic worth noticing. If elections are a liquidity risk, then democracy becomes a line item in the debt repayment schedule. And the debts didn't fall from the sky: by the prime minister's own account, this is money borrowed during Covid, now being repaid and refinanced with new borrowing. The repayment schedule is now setting democracy's calendar too.

The statement came as government partner ZNAM, led by Maksim Dimitrievski, threatens to leave the government over a dispute about the language of the bar exam. Mickoski said that wouldn't mean elections either, because the government has a majority even without ZNAM's MPs - according to him, the ruling majority has 75 to 76 MPs. The proposal for the exam, he said, has been sent to the Venice Commission: the theory part would be taken in the language in which the candidate completed higher education, and the practical written part exclusively in Macedonian and the Cyrillic script.

The message to his coalition partners is clear: leave if you want, the government stays. The message to citizens is even clearer - voting will wait until the regular date in 2028. Which leaves the question: if the state is so fragile that six months of a caretaker government would bankrupt it, what exactly was built in the years this debt was piling up?