Voters in Macedonia and Montenegro have more in common than just the fact that both countries are holding elections this month. Both electorates are hearing from candidates the promise of European integration, however questionable it is that anyone is capable of keeping that promise.

Macedonia is holding presidential and local elections on March 22, and the very least that has to be achieved if there is to be any hope of progress in the country’s European integration is that these elections proceed peacefully.

To try to show their determination to avoid a repeat of the violence during the 2008 parliamentary elections, Macedonian parties have pledged themselves to peaceful polls, and as a symbolic gesture, all presidential candidates but one sat down together on March 6 to a pizza lunch in a Skopje restaurant.

Macedonian media reports said that the lunch produced a "gentleman’s agreement" on peaceful campaigning, an ironic choice of phrase given that the only absentee was the Democratic Party of Albanians’ presidential candidate, Mirushe Hodza, the only woman in the race to succeed Branko Crvenkovski as head of state.

Opinion polls suggest that the candidate with the best chance to be the next president of Macedonia is law professor Georgi Ivanov, nominated by prime minister Nikola Gruevski’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE).

The other major presidential candidate is Ljubomir Frckovski, also a law professor, nominated by the centre-left Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), the party that is the lineal successor to the League of Communists of Macedonia, which ruled the country for the decades it was a constituent republic within Yugoslavia.

The other candidates are Ljube Boshkovski (independent), Nano Ruzin (Liberal-Democratic Party), Agron Budzaku (Democratic Union of Integration), Imer Selmani (New Democracy) and the Democratic Party of Albanians’ Hodza.

The job of president of Macedonia, which has a population estimated last year at just more than two million, is a largely ceremonial post has a five-year term with a two-term limit.
There is no clear indication that the March 22 presidential elections will produce a decisive result, meaning more than 40 per cent of the votes cast, in which case there will be a runoff on April 5. According to Macedonia media reports, quoting the state electoral commission, about 1.7 million people are eligible to vote.

A key issue is the name dispute with Greece, the prolonged standoff over the use of the name Macedonia which has prompted Athens to bar Skopje’s Nato and EU hopes.
Ivanov, whose party has a stated pro-EU and pro-Nato stance, announced on February 23 that he had chosen "One for All" as the slogan of his campaign, saying "I want political, ethnical and social consensus for European Atlantic integration to exist in Macedonia.

"Macedonia has to continue working on all necessary reforms, which are clauses for entering European Atlantic structures. An important step is the easing of the visa system," Ivanov said.

He vowed to work on getting a starting date for EU membership negotiations, and said that Macedonia would work on establishing good relations with all its neighbours.

A late February report in Macedonia’s Dnevnik daily quoted an unnamed EC official as saying that the EC would recommend a starting date for EU accession talks next autumn if elections went peacefully and Macedonia completed required reforms.

While Ivanov reportedly holds to a hard line on the name dispute, like Gruevski, a report by news agency Mina said that Frckovski had said that he would accept the country being called "North Macedonia", a compromise that Greek foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis reportedly has indicated would be acceptable to Athens.

In a March 8 election speech, Frckovski called for a change from the Gruevski government’s policy which, he said, effectively was keeping Macedonia in isolation.
On March 6, the SDSM called for a mechanism to take control of the economy and for the establishment of an economic crisis board made up of representatives of the government, opposition and independent experts. The party said Gruevski’s economic team had no idea how to respond to the economic crisis.

The economic crisis is the major issue in Montenegro’s March 29 elections, which have been called about halfway through the current 81-seat parliament’s four-year term.
The early elections were called, over the objections of opposition parties that said that electoral laws had not yet been revised to take account of constitutional changes, to seek a renewed mandate to deal with the economic crisis.

Montenegro, which has a population estimated by the United Nations in 2008 to be about 598 000, has just less than 500 000 voters according to official figures, although the criteria for eligibility to vote are disputed.

The country, facing severe economic problems, has been reported to be planning to cut thousands of jobs in the state sector and has faced protests about private sector job cutbacks, notably on February 9 when aluminium workers demanded that they be paid arrear salaries and called for an immediate restart to suspended production at Kombinat Aluminiuma Podgorica, a Russian-owned plant.

Foreign investment in the country has been dwindling, with a reverse of the trend in which Russians have been investing large sums in the country.

Overall, the global economic crisis has been taking its toll on Montenegro’s candidacy for membership of the European Union. In late February, the Czech presidency of the EU said that the EU Council of Ministers session had not agreed to accept Montenegro’s candidacy. Czech foreign minister Karl Schwarzenberg attributed this to concerns about the economy, indicating that Montenegro was the victim of bad timing. He hinted, however, that the decision could be reversed.

Prime minister Milo Djukanovic’s Party of Democratic Socialists appears reasonably strong enough to see off an opposition challenge, although much rides on the respective coalitions formed for the election by the governing and opposition parties, respectively.