site.btaHristijan Mickoski Submits Bill on Restructuring Government of North Macedonia

VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski submitted to the country's Parliament a bill on a new structure of the government of the Republic of North Macedonia. 

Some of the ministries will be transformed by adding or removing specific departments. For example, mining and mineral resources, which until now were part of the Ministry of Economy, will be added to the Ministry of Energy. The Agency for Youth and Sports will be under the Ministry of Sports, but work with youth will be part of the commitments of the Ministry of Social Policy, Demography and Youth, from where the department related to labour will move to the Ministry of Economy and Labour, and tourism - to the former Ministry of Culture, which will become the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The former Ministry of Information Society and Administration will be transformed into two ministries - of digital transformation and of administration.

The structural reform in the government was part of  VMRO-DPMNE's pre-election programme "Platform 1198", but the European Front coalition, led by the  Democratic Union for Integration, connects these changes with the departments that were part of the preliminary negotiations for forming a government that VMRO-DPMNE is holding with the coalition of ethnic Albanian parties VLEN, which would receive precisely ministries that do not have a large budget.

"The creation of a Ministry of Energy, Mining and Mineral Resources makes the Minister of Economy irrelevant and just a decoration, i.e. a minister without a portfolio. The same is expected to happen to the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, taking away the competences for pre-school education, i.e. kindergartens, and transferring these competences to the Ministry of Education, which will render useless another ministry led by Albanians," said Krenar Lloga from the European Front on Facebook.

In order for the change in the structure of the new government of the Republic of North Macedonia to be voted on in the country's Parliament, 80 MPs need to support it, which also constitute a two-thirds majority in the legislative body. However, the sum of the MPs of VMRO-DPMNE, VLEN and ZNAM, who are in talks to form a government, is 78.