Geweld tijdens verkiezingen bedreiging voor EU-ambities Macedonië (en)
Gun battles and reports of voting irregularities in Sunday's elections in Macedonia may have scuppered the Balkan country's near-term EU accession hopes, analysts warn.
Slovenia, which currently holds the bloc's six-month rotating presidency, said the EU "deeply deplored that violence and intimidation accompanied elections in parts of the country."
EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn called on Macedonian authorities to "to duly investigate all reported incidents and bring the perpetrators to justice."
Free and fair elections are "an essential part of the political criteria of the EU accession process," he said.
The centre-right Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) of prime minister Nikola Gruevski is claiming it won 48 percent of votes, which would give his coalition a majority in parliament.
But one supporter of an ethnic Albanian political party - the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) – was killed following a shoot-out with police, with nine other people injured over the weekend.
Gunfire also shut down polling stations in the country's ethnic Albanian regions, some ballot boxes disappeared, election monitors suffered threats and two election officials were briefly held by militants.
"Key international standards were not met in yesterday's elections, as organized attempts to violently disrupt the electoral process in parts of the ethnic Albanian areas made it impossible for voters in many places to freely express their will," an OSCE report said.
Mr Gruevski called the snap elections after Greece vetoed the former Yugoslav republic's membership at a NATO summit in April.
Following the violence, prime minster Gruevski announced that polls will be re-run in certain areas, which could change the reported results. The EU presidency welcomed the prime minister's announcement.
Analysts predicted that the incidents have dealt a heavy blow to Macedonia's EU accession hopes, however.
"We can expect a very bad [EU] report card," Dane Taleski, a law professor at Skopje university, told Reuters. "We won't be getting a date for [EU] accession talks this year."
"Our fatherland said goodbye to good reason and to its EU and NATO ambitions," local newspaper Dnevnik said in an editorial, according to Reuters.
Nonetheless, the EU presidency statement suggested Brussels remains optimistic: "Further steps in the European integration process are possible later this year by fulfilling the necessary conditions and implementing without delay the priorities identified within the accession partnership," it read.
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