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Nikola Gruevski, my friend: Time to Start the Revolution!

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 10/20/2010

Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia’s Prime Minister, is the most popular politician his country has ever had. Yet, instead of leveraging this overwhelming mandate to transform Macedonia and reform it from the roots up, he opted for “change by a thousand cuts”, a gradualist, incremental approach to the fundamental rot at the basis of this polity he oversees.

Evolutionary leaders are slaves to opinion polls and crave favourable media coverage. They are terrified of sea changes and look to the electorate for cues on what tinkering would be acceptable. Revolutionary leaders get on with the job of leaving behind a different society and revamped, functioning institutions – and damned the personal price they pay for their audacity and iconoclasm. When I co-authored a book about economics with Nikola, my best friend at the time, I thought he was a revolutionary.

By February 2007, less than 6 months into his first government, it was painfully clear to me that I have misjudged him. I was publicly vocal about my disillusionment which did not endear me to him. The global crisis has been a godsend to Gruevski and his hapless ministers: they blame all their failures and setbacks and confabulations on the pernicious tumult outside their country’s borders and not on their erroneous and pusillanimous and haphazard policies.

But it is not too late. Nikola still has the hearts if not the minds of most Macedonians. The majority believe that he is well-meaning although somewhat bumbling, a bit lost, and surrounded by venal sycophants. It is his last chance to alter Macedonia for the better in a profound way. He is the only leader with an unequivocal mandate to do so. Macedonia does not need Nikola’s cosmetics and PR: it needs him to administer gory plastic surgery. It does not need to look more beautiful: it needs to be more beautiful.

There is a lot that can be done on a foundational level: establish a non-governmental investment authority to dispense with foreign aid and foreign borrowing as well as administer tendering; introduce foreign-born directors to corruption-ridden segments of the public administration; introduce true competition into the health sector; subject judges to bi-annual exams and fire them if they do not pass; establish special, fast-track courts and binding arbitration for investment and other topics that require expertise and training; render campaign and political party finance transparent; enforce media ownership rules; reform the budgeting process and introduce incentives on all government levels, including the ministerial one; introduce a rating system for all public institutions; give priority in public tenders to small and medium enterprises; grant true autonomy to organs like the Bureau of Statistics ... In 1997, I published a list of 310 such reforms in the daily “Nova Makedonija”. On multiple occasions, Nikola had this list translated and distributed inside the Ministry of Finance and the ranks of his political party, the VMRO-DPMNE.

But, what am I doing? Nikola is aware of all these things and much more besides. He has access to privileged and real-time information. He has the right priorities. He just lacks the courage to confront, head-on, vested interests, powerful oligrachs, trenchant institutions, public mores and myths, an antiquated constitution, the corrupt media and, above all, his own people who thrive in this swamp because it is their comfort zone. So afraid he is to lose the next elections and so eager to curry public favour that he has sacrificed his deep convictions and integrity to his own career. True leaders show the way and are ready to pay the ultimate price. Alas, Nikola does not appear to be cut of this cloth. There is still time to prove me dead wrong.