Deralla for Morning Briefing: The election process was marked by a black campaign and gender-based hate speech

“In general, these elections were democratic, obviously, because the opposition won many of the positions in the local government. This means that citizens could freely express themselves at the polling stations, but we did have a very serious problem-the fingerprint devices. They practically marked the day and it’s good to see what Dashtevski’s statement meant in that the SEC does not guarantee the functionality of these fingerprint devices. He didn’t have to tell us, we all knew it, that no one can guarantee. However, someone has to take responsibility. Both political, and all other types of responsibility. Eleven million euros were used up, that is, if these devices are introduced into the system and serious work is done, one year will be needed for the system and for the people who are working…

We had a situation where we received information from unofficial sources that the system of the SEC hadn’t worked at one point, for a longer time. Also, we have a problem with the training of election boards”, stated the President of CIVIL, Xhabir Deralla today in Morning Briefing.

Deralla reflected on the attitude of some election bodies, such as the municipal election commissions, towards the Organization’s observers during Election Day.

“The State Election Commission and its bodies have really good and dedicated people who do their job professionally, but yesterday we had many unpleasant surprises, because some of the election bodies, including also the municipal election commissions, and we also have reports about this during last night, simply didn’t want to accept CIVIL’s observers. You have the only organization that has such experience in elections… There were more than ten cases where a member of an election board or president of an election board threw out our observers, under the excuse that CIVIL this year hadn’t been accredited in the SEC. That CIVIL’s place is not here, it was even said so with these words to an observer of ours, which is insulting. I spoke with a person from the SEC, I was promised that this would be fixed, however, there were three or four more such cases during the day”, pointed out Deralla.

In regards to the irregularities and incidents from yesterday’s Election Day, Deralla says that these elections, despite the minor irregularities, that we had fair and democratic elections.

“If you see that during election processes we have had killings, in local elections we have also had “Olympic” rounds, seventy or a hundred people at one address and so on, dragged by the ears, these elections were fair and democratic. Realistically, these elections were without incidents, and Spasovski’s number of 91 incidents surprised even us, we thought there were fewer. There were a series of irregularities that referred more to violation of the election silence… There is one problem, that the Macedonian political culture is such that there is huge “tolerance” towards the black campaign, and especially gender-based black campaign. There was an incredible black campaign against those few women who were lucky enough to enter the fight for local government, which is truly shameful. Ms. Zulueta, in interview with CIVIL MEDIA, stated that she was shocked when she came here and when she saw the previous situation. Now, it will probably be somewhat worse”, said Deralla.

Translation: N. Cvetkovska