Nikola Gruevski

Artan Grubi, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Inter-Community Relations in North Macedonia, along with Appeals Court Judge Enver Bexheti, has been added to the US State Department's "blacklist" due to significant corruption. The sanctions, which also affect their families, include a ban on entering the United States.

The leader of the opposition and largest Albanian party in Northern Macedonia, the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), Ali Ahmedi tonight called on the country’s Constitutional Court to reject all appeals filed with it challenging the law governing the use of the Albanian language in the country.

Incendiary statements by Hristijan Mickoski, the winner of North Macedonia's May 8 parliamentary election, have dispelled the illusion that his VMRO-DPMNE party, the core of the triumphant center-right coalition, is a modern European center-right party and not the nationalist populist formation led by his predecessor, Nikola Gruevski.

Bulgaria has provided assurances to the US special envoy for the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar, that it will not introduce fresh conditions for the accession of the Republic of North Macedonia into the European Union (EU).

North Macedonia's Justice Minister, Krenar Loga, told Monday's briefing with reporters in Skopje that his country would renew efforts to extradite former PM Nikola Gruevski who fled to Hungary to avoid a jail term.

Marjan Ivanov, former manager of Euro Consulting, the company that has been engaged to supervise the construction of stretches of the cross-European highway corridors 8 and 10d in North Macedonia, is a suspect in a fraud investigation related to the former government's grandiose revamp of the capital, 'Skopje 2014', BIRN has learned.

Nikola Gruevski, who was tried in absentia, was found guilty at Skopje Criminal Court on Thursday of unlawfully acquiring over 1.3 million euros from his former ruling VMRO DPMNE party, and of instigating a money-laundering scheme to cover his tracks and buy property with the proceeds.

The leader of North Macedona's main opposition party, VMRO DPMNE, Hristijan Mickoski, joined the celebrations marking Viktor Orban's victory in Sunday's Hungarian elections at Orban's Fidesz party HQ in Budapest.

The IPI report, titled "Hungarian Capital in Foreign Media. Three Strategic Models of Influencing the Neighbourhood", includes articles examining how, where and why Hungary has invested in foreign media in recent years.

All of this while back in Gruevski's home country, things are in flux as well. Gruevski's conservative VMRO DPMNE party, which under his rule was widely accused of "capturing the state institutions" including the judiciary, is now in a serious position to take on the pro-European Social Democratic leader Zoran Zaev, who toppled Gruevski back in 2017.