Semi-Annual Report: USAID/OTI Macedonia Support Initiative

In February 2015, Macedonia's opposition party, the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), began releasing portions of 670,000 illegally recorded conversations on more than 20,000 wiretapped phones, including those of activists, religious leaders, government officials, foreign diplomats, and more than 100 journalists. The European Commission determined the release of the tapes suggested "breaches of fundamental rights, interferences with judicial independence, media freedom and elections, and politicization and corruption in various fields." In their 2016 assessment of global political rights and civil liberties, Freedom House labeled the country as only "Partly Free," with one of the lowest scores in Europe and indicating a negative trajectory. Macedonia's score on the health of its democracy declined by 5 percent, with the most significant decline in the categories of National Democratic Governance, which declined by 12 percent, and Independent Media, which ranked significantly below the Balkan regional average. In June 2015, leaders of the four main political parties – VMRO-DPMNE and its Albanian coalition member DUI, SDSM and Albanian DPA – signed the Przino Agreement brokered by the E.U. with significant support from the USG. The agreement set a path towards elections on April 24, 2016 and called for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate potential crimes detailed in the wiretappings, an audit of the country's voter list, and reforms to increase media freedom. In a January 2016 letter to interim Prime Minister Emil Dimitriev, the E.U. and U.S. Ambassadors to Macedonia, Aivo Orav and Jess Baily, laid out several benchmarks, the achievement of which would assist in evaluating the probability of credible elections. However, the government failed to meet these benchmarks, with the European Policy Institute concluding that there was "no credible evidence that the voters' list [would] be cleaned up in time…media reforms [had] not even started…state control of the media was prevailing" and that the "obstructions to the implementation of the [Przino] Agreement, especially on the actions of the Special Prosecutor" indicated a lack of progress in separating state and party. Macedonia's parliamentary elections are now scheduled for December 11, 2016, following a new agreement between the four main parties. The parties agreed to the elections on the condition of appointing an ad-hoc media monitoring body in the 100 days preceding the election as well as the appointment of an SDSM-nominated Editor in Chief of the Macedonian state news broadcaster, MRTV. Both of these conditions have been met. Macedonia's media is among the least free in Europe, staunchly divided along party and ethnic lines and under immense political pressure. The wiretapping scandal offered a view into a "large-scale and illegal government wiretapping of journalists, corrupt ties between officials and media owners, and an increase in threats and attacks on media workers." The majority of Macedonia's mainstream television networks and online news portals are politically or economically linked with the government, creating a hyper-polarized landscape that discourages diverse narratives and suppresses critical reporting. Few independent platforms and journalists in Macedonia are able to withstand the threats and harassment in response to engaging in investigative or critical reporting. Pro-governmental media often produce a coordinated response to journalists and developments that are believed to be unfavorable to the government. In response to the lack of media reforms and unlikelihood that the electoral roll would be verified in time, several political parties, including SDSM and DPA, responded with promises to boycott the June elections.