The political processes taking place today in the Social Democratic Alliance are not a surprise, but a belated confirmation of what the ZNAM Movement has been warning about for years, that SDSM has moved away from its own values, abandoned the principles on which it was created and has become a closed and captive structure without a clear political vision, General Secretary of the ZNAM Movement for Our Macedonia, Goran Minchev, said in an interview with the Sloboden Pechat daily news outlet.
In the interview, he stressed that he did not want to speculate about the motives of the group that some time ago publicly criticized the current leadership of SDSM, but assessed that their performances essentially confirm the political analysis that ZNAM has been advocating for years.
“What we can see after holding that event and after the public appearances of its participants is confirmation of the thesis that ZNAM has been saying for five years now – that SDSM is an occupied and captured party and is implementing wrong policies. At this moment, although legally and formally Venko Filipche is the president with dubious legitimacy, in my opinion someone else is pulling the strings,” said Minchev.
He recalled that, in his opinion, only two individuals publicly opposed the then leadership during the time when SDSM had full political power.
“The only one who reacted when SDSM was at the zenith of its power, when it had the central government and controlled about 50 municipalities, was Maksim Dimitrievski, who, after Zoran Zaev’s interview for Bulgarian television in which he indicated that Bulgarians and Macedonians are the same people and that Kumanovo was liberated by the Bulgarians and made other historical nonsense, clearly and loudly stated that he did not agree with the policies of the then leadership. That is the difference between ZNAM and this initiative. The views of the then SDSM leadership, which seriously affected Macedonian history and national identity, were also reacted to, I would say, by the party’s founding father, or the DNA of SDSM, Mr. Branko Crvenkovski, who froze his membership,” Minchev stressed.
Regarding the speculation that Branko Crvenkovski is behind the ZNAM Movement, Minchev was adamant that such claims were incorrect.
