Walkout Stalls Macedonia Media Reform Talks

The negotiating team from the ruling VMRO DPMNE party of embattled Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski left the EU-sponsored talks on Tuesday after the opposition Social Democrats' leader Zoran Zaev described most of the mainstream media as his enemies.

The VMRO DPMNE said in a statement that it "strongly condemns today's attempt by Zaev to annul freedom of speech by pronouncing media to be enemies".

"Zaev and the Social Democrats today revealed their true intentions behind the fascist draft law on the media," the party said.

The new media reform package was unveiled on Monday by EU mediator Peter Vanhoutte, but the ruling party rejected it.

The package envisages ending the practice of appointing political party representatives to media supervisory bodies and replacing them with people endorsed by NGOs and universities.

It also envisages the equal distribution of government advertising funds among all five national TV broadcasters as well as stricter fines for biased reporting and hate speech.

Social Democrat (SDSM) leader Zaev said he welcomed the mediator's proposal, adding that he believes that most of the mainstream media in Macedonia are currently biased.

"At the moment it is the SDSM's and my personal opinion that media like Sitel TV, Kanal 5 TV, Alfa TV, Dnevnik [newspaper] and Macedonian Radio Television [the public broadcaster] are our big political enemy. They are partly being financed by our money, yours and mine," Zaev told a press conference.

The SDSM responded to criticism of Zaev's 'enemy' comment by saying that "the catastrophic media situation and the government diktat over most of the media is the reason for the internationally-brokered negotiations on media reforms" in the first place.<...