Macedonia

There are three big elections on Sunday: Portugal, Peru and Macedonia. (Turkey is the week after). I have been completely unable to get excited about Macedonia, but to complete the diary here are some quick facts:

Image from Wikimedia

The Country is what I call a C-list european country: Not as good as Bulgaria or Hungary, but a heck of a lot better than Belarus or Russia. It shares that list with places like Bosnia, Turkey and Albania; I'd say Croatia has recently been promoted to the B-list and if everything goes to plan in Egypt and Tunisia they might claw up into the C-list.

There are good things about Macedonia. The economy's not too bad, and most people don't feel like there's a lot of corruption (less than in Italy or Greece, though more than Poland or Spain). I personally would love to go and take a look at it and eat some beans. One thing that might not be so much fun is that if, like for example the A1 television station, you say mean things about the government you might find that your neighbours have their taxes audited. In the middle of the night. By armed police.

Which leads us on to the second point, which is that the parliament is incredibly pissy. After the raid on A1-TV, all the opposition (centre-left) parties stormed out, declaring that they were going to their room and they weren't coming out until there was an election. The ruling (centre-right) party had an absolute majority anyway, but eventually got embarrassed trying to debate empty benches and called the election. I think their campaign slogan has been "Crybaby wants a bottle, wah wah wah".

So yeah. I don't know who'll win: in 2008 the government had a 25-point (!) lead over the opposition, which suggests it'd take some kind of miracle for them to loose; on the other hand, some of the very few polls knocking around have the Government, Opposition, Haven't Decided and Mind Your Own Beeswax all on about 20%. So, don't know.

But hey! Here's something interesting: Greece will veto Macedonia's entry to the EU unless they change their name.

See, when some people hear "Macedonia", they think of this:

Image from a site that says it's all macedonia

Clearly, if you're living in Salonica, you might get a bit nervous about maps that include your street in the next country over. There appear to be a lot more Greeks who believe their Slavic neighbours are itching to invade than there are Slavs who believe their country should rightly have a coastline, but that seems to be the nub of the issue.

There also seems to be some serious resentment among Greeks who think the Slavic Macedonians are horning in on the Alexander the Great heritage which rightly belongs to them.

Image from someone who is super-angry about the Skopje government misrepresenting the words of Strabo  (63 BC to 24 AD)

Mathematically speaking, this is a little bit silly. Greeks and Slavs are both all probably descended from any given individual alive at the time (though not Alexander himself, as his only son died without issue). For that matter, so are 99% of my readers (I make a possible exception for the visitors from Thailand, but definitely not those from Pakistan).

In any case, the effect has been that Skopje has tried to mollify Athens by changing their flag to look less like the ancient Macedonian one, and managed to get into the UN with the stage-name "The Former Yugloslav Republic of Macedonia". Lots of people don't like this, perhaps feeling it's a bit purple-motorcycle, which I can understand.

Much as I normally love wading into specious ethnic arguments, I don't really have a side here. On one hand, I support the idea that people can call their country whatever they like. Call it Atlantis if that's what turns you on, it'll have as much historical legitimacy as most founding myths. On the other hand, I can see why neighbours of country Wherever start getting nervous when it starts throwing around terms like Greater Wherever. Had I been in charge of Macedonia around the time Greece started kicking off, I probably would have said "Fine, our name is now the Republic of the Inhabitants of the Region Around the River Vadar, now can we please get up on some of those EU regional development funds because I am jonesing for real".