Macedonia, which is a candidate to join the European Union, faces an escalating political crisis amid allegations of a planned “coup”, a mass wiretapping scandal, and claims that the government and the secret service conspired to undermine the judiciary and rig media coverage.

On Friday, the Macedonian opposition leader, Zoran Zaev, released the latest of what he has called information “bombs” against the government – a series of allegedly wiretapped conversations of the prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, the head of the secret service and other senior officials, in which they apparently discuss interference in the judiciary, media and urban-planning process. One of the major protagonists is Saso Mijalkov, Gruevski’s first cousin and head of the shady security and counterintelligence agency, the UBK.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Macedonian prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, dismissing claims of illegal wiretapping and repeating claims that Zoran Zaev was plotting to overthrow the government. Photograph: Boris Grdanoski/AP

The opposition claims that the government and UBK have been running a massive wiretapping programme, monitoring the telephone conversations of 20,000 Macedonians, including journalists, politicians and religious figures – a larger number than were bugged under communism.

Ivo Vajgl, a Slovenian politician and the European parliament’s rapporteur on Macedonia, told the Guardian the situation in the country was “very serious”. “I don’t want to be a prophet of catastrophic scenarios, but you have to take into account that there are many open problems, harsh words and even hate speech,” he said.

“We have seen this before in the Balkans, everything starts like this. The situation should not be underestimated,” he said. “It is very serious – we have to help Macedonia.”

Macedonia has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2005, but negotiations have repeatedly been blocked by Greece due to a dispute over the country’s name. (Athens objects to the name Republic of Macedonia as it believes this name implies a claim to the northern Greek province of Macedonia and has vetoed Skopje’s participation in international organisations, including the EU, until the issue is resolved.) While EU officials have repeatedly recommended that talks begin, there have been growing concerns that Macedonia is backsliding on its commitment to European values such as freedom of the press and an independent judiciary.



These have been amplified by Zaev’s “bombs”. The Social Democrat leader has released five since he was charged by police for allegedly conspiring with an unnamed foreign spy agency to bring down the government on 31 January, having threatened the government with revelations for several months, apparently in an attempt to force Gruevski to accept a government of national unity. The opposition leader has backed away from his initial claims that the wiretaps were obtained with the help of a foreign country.

Zaev claims that forthcoming tapes will expose Gruevski’s suspected machinations over the “name issue” and the closure of an opposition television station. He has also said that future revelations may include an ethnic element. In 2001, Macedonia fought one of Europe’s most recent wars, between the government and ethnic Albanian guerrillas – about a quarter of the population are Albanian.

The government accuses Zaev of espionage and plotting a coup, attacking the means by which the opposition obtained the tapes, but equivocating on the veracity of the content.

“As the prime minister has said, some of the material is true, some is half-true and some is false,” said Antonio Milošoski, deputy speaker of parliament and a former foreign minister. “The content of the material will be taken seriously by institutions, but we must wait for the legal process to end to see whether we can be confident in the authenticity of these conversations that have been selectively leaked to the public as part of Zaev’s attempt to blackmail the prime minister into giving him power he lost in the election.”

Tensions in Macedonia have been mounting since a disputed election in April 2014, in which the ruling conservative VMRO-DPMNE party of Gruevski defeated Zaev’s ex-communist Social Democrats (SDSM) for a fourth consecutive occasion. Zaev claimed that the elections had been fraudulent and accused Gruevski of operating a “dictatorship”. The SDSM has boycotted parliament ever since, despite EU pressure to return to the assembly. Supporters of the government and the opposition have become ever-more polarised, to the extent that people from opposing camps who have been neighbours for years no longer talk to one another.

Claims of creeping government authoritarianism, manipulation of independent institutions and even “Putinisation” have been on the rise in central and eastern Europe in recent years. Concerns about the removal of checks and balances and limited freedom for opposition media have been raised in the EU member states of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and in candidate countries including Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia.

Florian Bieber, a political scientist focusing on south-east Europe, said: “The Macedonian government has been behaving in a rather authoritarian manner, and there is a sense that judges and journalists are influenced by the government, so the wiretapping is not a huge surprise.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘Putinisation’,” he said, “but weak state and democratic institutions can be undermined by democratically elected governments and supplemented by informal networks centring on leaders like Gruevski. The model is more Turkey than Russia.”

Government officials admit that Macedonia has shortcomings, but insist that the EU accession process will help build a more transparent, functional system in the country. Support for EU membership is high, at about three-quarters of the population, and Vajgl repeated his recommendation to the EU that talks commence.

Despite growing concerns in Brussels and elsewhere about Macedonia’s political crisis, a descent into conflict is seen as unlikely.

Chris Deliso, the Macedonia-based director of independent news website Balkanalysis.com, said: “Macedonia’s current political drama is being intensified by local media according to a partisan discourse.

“Presently, we can only speculate about the veracity of any allegations – we simply don’t know the facts, and all the protagonists in this drama modify, add to or even contradict their claims on a daily basis. While the foreign media tends to emphasise an alleged ethnic divide in Macedonia, there are no real ‘ethnic tensions’ – people have lived and will continue together in peace.”