Macedonia Readies for the Referendum

30 August 2004

Todor Petrov, the President of the World Macedonian Congress and initiator of the campaign to collect 150,000 signatures necessary to call for a referendum, announced that the campaign has succeeded and that he is prepared to present the 185,000 signatures to the Speaker of the Parliament. At the referendum, the citizens of Macedonia will decide whether they will accept the new Law on Territorial Organization of Macedonia or not. The signatures will be inspected by the regional offices of the Ministry of Justice.
The joint opposition expects from the Speaker to call for a Parliamentary session on the Referendum initiative on September 5, and the actual plebiscite should be held in the beginning of November.

The new municipal map of Macedonia

According to Ljupco Jordanovski, the Speaker of the Parliament, the date of the actual referendum will depend on the MPs of the ruling coalition. However, it remains unclear whether the Parliament should vote on whether to actually vote on the holding of the referendum, having in mind that the Constitution says that for initiatives that collect over 150,000 signatures, the Referendum is obligatory.

The legal experts say that the MPs can�t overthrow the decision to call for a Referendum. They can�t decide whether to hold a referendum or not, but only discuss the technical aspects of the initiative: the type of plebiscite, the Law it refers to, the text of the question asked at the Referendum and the date of the poll.

The biggest question, it seems, remains what will happen if the Referendum is successful? What if the citizens come out and vote against the new Law on Territorial Organization of the Units of Local Self-Government?

The State Electoral Commission will publish the results and will submit them to the Parliament. Then, several experts claim, the New Law will be abolished by default, and the old 1996 Law will enter into force again.

However, another group of experts point out at Article 25 of the Law on Referendum, which states that the Parliament is obligated to regulate, within 60 days of the plebiscite, the issue on which a referendum was called, in accordance with the results of the poll. It means that the Parliament is, indeed, entitled and obligated to decide on this issue, in which case, the Badentaire�s formula may bi applied.