Macedonian conservatives secure win
Macedonia's conservatives, led by former minister Nikola Gruevski, have secured victory in a bitterly contested national election after a poll rerun in a single station did not give the leftist opposition enough votes to overtake their rivals.
The rerun, in the northwestern village of Tearce, 50km from the capital of Skopje, gave the opposition, led by the Social Democrats, 245 votes to 149 for the conservatives, led by Gruevski's VMRO-DPMNE party. There were 402 people voting out of 714 registered.
The rerun had been ordered following complaints about voting irregularities from the opposition Social Democrats.
Sunday's result has not been officially announced but has been posted on the website of Macedonia's Election Commission.
With the rerun result in, VMRO-DPMNE wins 454,577 votes and 51 seats in the 120-member parliament to 436,981 votes and 49 seats for the Social Democrats. The latter needed to secure 307 votes over the conservatives in a rerun to gain a 50th seat at the conservatives' expense.
What is certain is that Gruevski will need to form a coalition government with onee or more of the Albanian-minority parties, as he has done in the past. But, this time, coalition-building will be complicated by the emergence of two new Albanian-minority parties. The largest Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, has been a reliable Gruevski partner in the past.
The national election was called two years early as part of a Western-brokered deal to defuse a two-year political crisis sparked by a massive wiretapping scandal. The left-wing opposition blamed Gruevski for an illegal wiretapping operation targeting more than 20,000 people.
