THE POISON PILL OF NATIONAL POPULISM (MACEDONIAN VERSION)

Macedonia's populist leader taking a delivery from Keir Starmer

by Nix Jeelvy

There’s a popular Macedonian curse I like to use: црнци по дома да ти играат (crnci po doma da ti igraat). It translates to "may negros dance in your house." It's one of those medium-rare curses for when "you're stupid" is insufficient, but "I fuck your mother’s pussy" is a tad excessive. Well, I may stop using it, friends, because my long suffering country is about to be inundated with refused British asylum seekers, some of whom may indeed be dancing Africans.

The British and Macedonian prime ministers have allegedly agreed for Macedonia to accept asylum seekers who’ve been turned away from the UK. For the privilege, Macedonia will receive £20,000 per migrant. The migrants are expected to seek employment in the Macedonian construction sector which, incidentally, is one of the main ways for the Albanian mafia to launder its dirty money. 

To say that even a small number of migrants would disrupt life here would be an understatement. Macedonia is a small and shrinking country. Our population is a smidge over two million, a population which is ageing and ethnically divided. While the official census numbers are bullshit (they're not allowed to be anything else due to our convoluted "affirmative action" laws), the country is fairly diverse, with the main ethnic groups being Macedonians and Albanians, followed by the indispensable Roma/gypsies and a worryingly increasing population of Turks rounding out the roster.

Bringing in denied asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and God knows where else, would do much to fan the flames of ethnic tension which already plague my beloved homeland. The financial strain of absorbing these newcomers, most of whom have been turned away from the UK for being too antisocial or unable to contribute to a modern economy, will further strain a struggling economy (the second or third poorest in Europe, depending on how you calculate it). For a long time, Macedonians found comfort in the fact that while we are poor and downtrodden, at least we could walk our streets in relative peace, as violent crime is not very common here. Now, I suppose, that’s about to change.

This is, of course, bad and it's been all anyone could talk about for the past week in Macedonia, but why would it be newsworthy? Why should the presumably international audience of this august publication care for the woes of some "benighted Balkan shithole," which shares a name with a salad, a brand of cigarettes and a Mormon community in Ohio? Well, the answer is, because the migrant deal was negotiated by a national populist government.

The ruling party of prime minister Hristijan Mickoski, the DPMNE, has been described as "conservative," "centre-right," "Christian democrat," "nationalist," and other charming epithets. Many of these appellations may have applied to it in the past. In my own assessment, being somewhat privy to party history, thanks to having relatives who were at one point part of the leadership, I’d say that the party was nationalist from its founding in 1990 to 1996, Christian democrat from 1998 to 2004, neoliberal and technocratic between 2004 and 2008, until it finally stumbled onto national populism as a winning formula. This has served it well from 2008 'til today, with a notable Trumpian turn towards open criminality and rampant corruption in 2023.

Its closest ideological compatriot would be Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, which also happens to be a close ally. In fact, DPMNE is financially dependent on Fidesz and would flounder were Fidesz to lose power in Hungary.

Hungary's Viktor Orban

As has now become depressingly common, self-proclaimed nationalists are actively undermining the national well-being of their peoples by bringing in hostile foreigners in numbers never even conceived of by leftist parties. In a stunning declaration, the leader of Macedonia’s Social Democratic Union Venko Filipče has called for withdrawal from the deal with the UK, warning that Macedonia mustn’t become a "Mecca for migrants" and insinuated that DPMNE is bringing in the migrants as a means of constructing a "migrant electoral machine. (Link in Macedonian)"

The response from the DPMNE spin machine has been to gaslight people worried about the migrant wave, denying the deal until we learned about it from the British media, and then downplaying the impact of the migrants. In particular, their social media bots and gargoyles fixated on denying that the migrants will be housed in camps. Of course, this implies that the migrants will be released into the general population, but apparently, the phrase "migrant camps" was the problem, so the order came down from party headquarters to flood the zone with bullshit about that.

When pressed about the incoming migrants by a journalist in an interview, prime minister Mickoski deflected by asking why nobody’s talking about the good things he's done, pointing to a recent day where air pollution in Skopje was lower than in Vienna. For context, Skopje has the second worst air quality in Europe after Tetovo, a city in north-western Macedonia, and the day in question on which we had clearer air than Vienna was one of the windiest on record.

So, to recap, a supposed "nationalist" government made a deal with the UK to accept its rejected refugees, securing much needed cheap labour for their cronies in the construction and food delivery industries, then pretended that it didn't know about it until the British media broke the story, and then it dispatched its party rats and bots on social media to gaslight the outraged population, whilst the gormless prime minister went on TV and called on everyone to think positive thoughts about his abysmal leadership.

The behaviour of DPMNE is hardly an exception among national populist parties. The extended organised crime network they belong to also includes Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin. All four of these men have used nationalist rhetoric to attain and secure their power, whilst simultaneously putting their nations on course to destruction, whether through initiating aggressive wars which shredded their reputation (Netanyahu & Putin), allowing replacement legal immigration combined with subsidising the reproduction of extant minorities (Orban & Putin), or all of the above (Trump). Or just through plain, old-fashioned, rampant corruption and destruction of state capacity (all of them).

I’ve written this brief, informative piece on Macedonia’s incoming migrant nightmare as a warning to earnest nationalists everywhere. Do not expect national populists to prevent replacement migration. Their donor class needs the slave labour and they themselves may need the migrants’ votes.

Whatever may be the way to save European nations, national populism—whether Putinist, Trumpist, Orbanian, or what we have here in long-suffering Macedonia—is definitely not it.