Vučić Falls, and VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM Fight Over Who Was His Bigger Friend

Aleksandar Vučić has lost the elections in Serbia, and in Skopje a contest has begun to pin his name on the other side. SDSM leader Venko Filipče said that "the Balkan criminal octopus is collapsing, and after Vučić and Orbán, Mickoski will be next". VMRO-DPMNE answered with a statement and a press conference by spokesperson Valentin Manasievski - and with videos from parties.

The ruling party's line is that Filipče and Zoran Zaev spent years building close ties with Vučić: pacts, get-togethers "until the early morning hours", a welcome with the highest honours at the border. According to VMRO-DPMNE, people close to Vučić were handed positions - a Vučić man was appointed director of the state power company ESM, and Vučić's best man, Bašanović, became the party's PR chief. "Venko Filipče and Aleksandar Vučić are one and the same," the party said.

The piece of evidence that got the most airtime was musical. Manasievski released videos of Filipče and Zaev partying in Dubai while Serbian singer Haris Džinović performed for them, plus footage of Džinović with Ana Brnabić and other Vučić ministers, as well as Vučić himself. If a singer once sang at your party, you're the political ally of everyone he ever sang for - that is the logic of the press conference.

Manasievski went a step further: SDSM's sister party in Hungary failed to get into parliament, the one in Serbia came ninth, and SDSM, according to him, finished fourth in Brvenica and Kumanovo and fifth in Skopje in the last early local elections. That's why, he says, SDSM "runs from early elections like the devil from incense".

Would this friendship be so shameful if Vučić had won? Now that he's heading into opposition, closeness to him has suddenly become compromising material that each side hurls at the other.

It's an old Balkan reflex: the powerful neighbour is a friend while he's powerful, and the moment he falls he becomes a label you stick on your opponent. People got videos from Dubai and a list of results by municipality. What they didn't get is an answer to the question of what Macedonia actually gained from all those pacts and border welcomes.