Albanians in North Macedonia

The four Albanian construction workers who died in the collapse of a scaffolding in Hamburg on Monday, as well as their injured colleague, worked in Germany with fake Bulgarian passports, Albanian media reports.

The foreign ministers of Bulgaria and North Macedonia signed the bilateral protocol to Art. 12 of the Treaty of Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Cooperation.

The document will form part of Skopje's negotiating framework for EU membership and contains measures for the history, hate speech and culture curricula.

Over two decades, Ali Ahmeti's Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, has gone from marginal political player to indispensable factor in government.

Portals under the Tetova-sot media group. Illustration: BIRN

Party affiliate reaps rewards of weak system

Rami Mislimi works in the mainly ethnic Albanian Municipality of Tetovo and at the same time pushes his journalistic career through the portal tetovasot.com.

As North Macedonia on Friday marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Ohrid Peace Accord that ended the 2001 conflict between security forces and Albanian insurgents, an original of the historic document has finally been sent to the State Archive.

What no one imagined was that Ahmeti's DUI was promoting a profound conceptual and ideological redesign, in effect, becoming a green party.

Party with history of surprises

The head of DUI, Ali Ahmeti gives a speech during the commemoration of the killed NLA fighters on May 5, 2021. Photo DUI

Monday's agreement between Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, the leader of the ruling Social Democrats, and the opposition VMRO DPMNE party leader, Hristijan Mickoski, to postpone the nationwide census for six months from April to September due to the COVID-19 crisis has angered members of the ruling coalition as well as opposition parties.

As ethnic Albanian parties battle for supremacy ahead of the spring general election, the formation of the first-ever mixed Macedonian-Albanian pre-election alliance has upset election calculations.

The junior ruling ethnic Albanian party in North Macedonia has reacted with dismay to the announcement of a new election alliance between its senior partner and another ethnic Albanian party.

A senior official from the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, said the new agreement between the Social Democrats and BESA would only damage the Albanian vote in the April general elections.

The smaller ethnic Albanian parties in the country can only hope to defeat the hegemonic force of the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, in next year's early elections if they band together.