Nikola Gruevski (born 31 August 1970) is a former Macedonian politician who served as Prime Minister of Macedonia from 2006 until his resignation in 2016, in accordance with the internationally mediated Pržino Agreement due to the Macedonian political crisis, and led the party VMRO-DPMNE from 2004 to 2017. He was the longest serving post-independence Macedonian prime minister, serving more than nine years in office.
He instigated the controversial identity politics called antiquization and the project Skopje 2014. His rule in Macedonia (now North Macedonia) contributed to democratic backsliding and the regime he led was authoritarian. His government was responsible for the illegal wiretapping of 20,000 people in the country. In May 2018, he was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges, but in November 2018 he fled to Hungary, where he was granted political asylum. He has been also convicted in absentia.
Early life and ancestry Born in Skopje, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on 31 August 1970, Gruevski was raised in a family that was neither privileged nor poor. His father (born in northern Greece) worked in furniture and design, and his mother was a nurse. After his parents' divorce, he was raised by his mother. When he was four, his mother went to work in Libya, like thousands of other Yugoslav citizens, and took him with her. After their return, he completed primary and secondary education in Skopje. Having graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Prilep of the St. Clement of Ohrid University in Bitola in 1994 (where he practiced amateur theater and boxing).
Gruevski's paternal grandparents were from the Ottoman Macedonian village of Krušoradi (later Achlada) in the Manastir Vilayet, where his grandfather Nikolaos Grouios (Nikola Gruev) was born. Gruevski's grandfather, as part of the Greek army, fought in the Greco-Italian War and was killed by Italian forces during the Italian invasion of Albania. His name is mentioned on the war memorial in Achlada among the names of the locals who were killed during World War II. During the Greek Civil War, Gruevski's family fled to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, like thousands of other Slavs in Greek Macedonia. They changed their surname to obtain Yugoslav citizenship through assimilation. His family had gained political influence during the 1970s and 1980s, mostly through Gruevski's uncle, Jordan Mijalkov, who worked as the director of a large Macedonian trading company, and later as the first Minister of Interior of the Republic of Macedonia, had extensive contacts with the Yugoslav security services. His family lost its political influence, including connections to oligarchs and secret service, after the death of Jordan Mijalkov.
Career
Finance and entry into politics Gruevski entered Republic of Macedonia's new finance sector, and was the first person to trade on Skopje's stock exchange. During 1995, he worked as the director of department in Multigroup-owned Balkanbank, and worked as its exhibitioner until 1998. In 1996, he also acquired qualifications for the international capital market from a London Securities Institute. He founded the Brokerage Association of Macedonia in 1998 and made the first transaction on the Macedonian Stock Exchange. Gruevski established contact with members of the nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE. In 1996, he entered politics, becoming a local councillor in Skopje. In the next year, he began writing about economics. In 1998, he was the minister of trade, and in December 1999, he became the minister of finance in the government of Ljubčo Georgievski. He introduced value-added tax, flat tax and returned property seized by the communists. In this period, Gruevski managed to gain personal contacts and resources to begin his own rise to power. Gruevski served as a minister until 2002.
Gruevski was the president of the State Securities and Exchange Commission from 2000 to 2002. He was also the president of the Parliamentary Committee for cooperation with the European Parliament from 2002 to 2003. In 2003, he worked as an advisor to the Minister of Finance of Serbia within a USAID project for strengthening the capacity of the Ministry of Finance and transferring experience from the countries in transition to Serbia. After serving as its deputy president, he became the president of VMRO-DPMNE in May 2003. He was a member of the Macedonian parliament from September 2002 to August 2006. Gruevski had the reputation of a reformist and pro-European politician in comparison with the more radical wing of Ljubčo Georgievski, who opposed the Ohrid Framework Agreement and advocated partitioning the country between Macedonians and Albanians. Georgievski left the party to form his own party, VMRO – People's Party. Social Democratic Union of Macedonia's government passed the Law on Decentralization (which enabled Albanians to gain more municipalities with ethnic Albanian majorities) in 2004 amid strong opposition from VMRO-DPMNE's supporters and Gruevski, who accused SDSM of treason.
Prime Minister (2006–2016)
After winning the 2006 election, Gruevski created a government with the Democratic Party of Albanians on 28 August 2006. His government included many people in their thirties as ministers. Vowing to focus on economic progress and job creation, Gruevski also vowed to deal with corruption and work towards Macedonia's entry into NATO and the EU. At the beginning of his mandate, Gruevski created Invest in Macedonia, an agency that promoted the country as a safe haven for global finance. Gruevski directly made business deals, with the goal of bringing to Macedonia 138 factories and 62,700 new jobs, consisting of more than €3.8 billion of investment.
Gruevski assigned his first cousin Sašo Mijalkov as the leader of the Administration for Security and Counterintelligence, and placed his other cousin Vlatko Mijalkov in the Customs Administration. In 2006, he obtained a master's degree from the Faculty of Economics at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje with the thesis "Foreign Direct Investments, Economic Development and Employment". His decision not to include in government the largest ethnic Albanian party, Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), caused protests. The party ended up boycotting the parliament throughout 2007. According to The Economist, his first years had economic growth and a focus on the economy. Per economic analyst Branimir Jovanovikj in 2015, growth during Gruevski's rule from 2007 to 2013 was 2.6%, lower than the growth before he came to power when the average GDP growth from 2002 to 2006 was 3.5%. Balkan Insight reported that GDP grew around 5% in 2007 and 2008. The Macedonian Encyclopedia also reported that the GDP was 5.9% in 2007.
His government initiated a policy of antiquization, depicting the Macedonian nation-state as originating from the ancient period. Gruevski's historical negationism divided ethnic Macedonians between opponents and supporters of the myth of ancient origin. In the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit, Greece vetoed Macedonia's NATO accession, because of the Macedonia naming dispute. After the summit, Gruevski launched a case against it to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Later, Greece also blocked the start of Macedonia's EU accession negotiations. Per political scientist Florian Bieber, it is "this rejection by NATO and the EU that pushed the Macedonian government toward an authoritarian path". The coalition led by his party, VMRO-DPMNE, won the 1 June 2008 parliamentary election, their second electoral victory in a row, winning more than half of the seats in the parliament. His party campaigned for EU and NATO membership. This time, Gruevski created a government with DUI.
He transformed himself into a hard-line Macedonian nationalist. Gruevski presented himself as a political outsider who came to power to defend the dignity of "ordinary people" who were discriminated by political elites. Glorification of the people and anti-elitism became part of his rhetorical demagogy. Gruevski portrayed himself as the toughest defender of Macedonia's name and identity, and adopted a hard-line stance towards Greece. Gruevski's government isolated and undermined journalists and news outlets which were regarded as critical of VMRO-DPMNE and him. This crackdown on independent media resulted in criticism against his government within and outside Macedonia due to the increased level of authoritarianism and illiberalism. Like other populists, Gruevski did not like criticism from the media, which he perceived as "elite subversion of the will of the people".
In 2011, Gruevski's government initiated a reconstruction of Skopje in a project called Skopje 2014. His government launched a campaign labelling anyone opposing the project as a traitor of national interests, a "Sorosoid" and a Greek mercenary. VMRO-DPMNE won again in the election on 5 June 2011, permitting him to remain in power. In 2011, ICJ ruled that Greece violated the Interim Agreement by blocking Macedonia's membership to NATO since 2008. However, the ruling was ignored by Greece. On 6 January 2012, Gruevski admitted that he personally was the instigator of the Skopje 2014 project.
The US Department of State in its 2013 "Macedonia Human Rights Report" reported that the mainstream media rarely published views against the government. The elections on 27 April 2014 were also won by VMRO-DPMNE. SDSM did not recognize the results and boycotted the parliament due to electoral fraud. In 2014, Gruevski began to rush plans through parliament to create a tax-free autonomous trade zone that falls outside the purview of both domestic and international regulators. The move raised alarm among government critics and some supporters of Gruevski as it sounded like a license to commit financial crimes. The European Union's Venice Commission commented that "If all laws (other than criminal laws) are to be enacted and enforced by a managing body rather than the constitutionally recognised lawmaker and executive, this zone becomes a sort of a 'State within a State' separate from the existing constitutional structure" and could become "a haven for 'dirty money.'" The World Media Freedom Index 2014 by the organization Reporters Without Borders ranked Macedonia in the 123rd place out of 179 countries.
In 2015, the former prime minister and founder of the VMRO-DPMNE, Ljubčo Georgievski accused Gruevski's government of having a goal to serbianize the country, and join it to Serbia. However, a political analyst disputed this argument and made the accusation that there was bulgarianization instead for favoring Bulgarian historical figures.