Macedonia PM tenders resignation in crisis deal

Macedonia's prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, offered his resignation on Friday as part of a western-brokered deal to end the Balkan state's rumbling political crisis, and to prepare for early elections scheduled for April.

The speaker of Macedonia's parliament, Trajko Veljanoski, said he would wait for the outcome of Friday's talks between the government, opposition and visiting EU enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn before asking deputies to vote on Mr Gruevski's resignation, amid rancour over arrangements for the ballot.

Mr Gruevski agreed to make way for an interim cabinet after a storm of lurid revelations last year from the release of wiretapped conversations, which implicated the ruling elite in mass surveillance, sprawling corruption schemes and egregious abuse of power.

The government denied the allegations and claimed opposition leader Zoran Zaev had acquired the wiretaps from an unnamed foreign intelligence service as part of a plot to oust Mr Gruevski, a conservative who has ruled for almost a decade.

Envoys from the European Union and United States intervened to defuse the crisis, which saw tens of thousands of people attend pro- and anti-Gruevski rallies and Mr Zaev's supporters create a protest camp outside government headquarters.

Mr Zaev and his Social Democrats accuse the government of failing to fulfil the agreement for snap elections, by not implementing key measures to ensure a fair vote, including media reform and revision of electoral rolls.

Friday's talks were expected to centre on the fears of government officials that Mr Gruevski and his cabinet may resign, but Mr Zaev could also reject plans for the April election, throwing Macedonia into political limbo.

Alarm over Macedonia's stability surged last May, when clashes between security forces and gunmen in the town of Kumanovo, near the border with Kosovo and Serbia, left 18 people dead.

The clash has still not been fully explained, but many Macedonians saw it as a government attempt to distract attention from the corruption scandal.

A western-brokered peace deal halted Macedonia’s slide towards conflict in 2001, when rebels launched an insurgency to demand more rights for the country’s ethnic-Albanian minority, which comprises almost one-third of its population of 2 million.

As the Kremlin continues to vie with the EU and US for influence in the Balkans, Moscow has claimed that the West wants to oust Mr Gruevski for refusing to join a sanctions regime against Russia, and for supporting Russian plans to build a major regional gas pipeline through Macedonia.

Critics accuse Mr Gruevski of using populist and nationalist rhetoric to boost his popularity, and his supporters carried Russian flags, pictures of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and pan-Slavic and Orthodox Christian symbols during last year's protests, causing further unease among ethnic-Albanians in Macedonia.