SKOPJE, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Macedonia is left without elected local authorities starting from Monday.
Due to the deep political crisis in the country, new local elections have not been scheduled and the mandate of the current mayors and local councils expired.
This threatens to seriously affect the functioning of the municipalities in Macedonia where a vast number of services and operations have been decentralized at local level.
"It will mean a total collapse of the system that will affect every citizen. For example, as local authorities, we maintain the local public transport in Skopje, or the local water supply," said Koce Trajanovski, who was mayor of the Macedonian capital Skopje in the past four years.
"All of these vital operations will be jeopardized, because they are financed through the local budgets," Trajanovski said.
"We are facing a complete blockade of the service that the municipalities offer to the citizens. Not a single document can be issued in the municipality if it is not authorized by the council or signed by the mayor," said Stevcho Jakimovski, mayor of Karposh municipality.
"When it comes to financing the schools and the kindergartens, we receive the money from the state budget and we transfer it to them, so it means that their work will also be jeopardized," Jakimovski said.
Unlike for the institutions on central level, the laws in Macedonia do not allow the mandate of the local authorities to be prolonged until new mayors and councils are elected.
In the past months there have been several initiatives to the Constitutional court to prolong the mandate of the local authorities, but the highest court decided that it has no authority to discuss the issue.
"We can't allow that the citizens pay the price of the irresponsible politics," Andrej Petrov, former president of the Association of units of local-selfgovernment of the Republic of Macedonia, told Xinhua in Skopje.
"(Due to) the legal vacuum in the functioning of the municipalities, the citizens will not be able to exercise their rights. We need urgent changes in the Election Law and the Law on the Local Self-Government," Petrov said.
The newly-elected Parliament speaker Tallat Xhaferi is expected to hold coordinating meeting among the parliamentary political parties on Monday in an attempt to find a solution to the issue.
But as a result of the deep political crisis in the country, the solution for now is far from sight. Although political parties agree that the local authorities are vital, their view for the way to solve the crisis differs.
SDSM, the party that leads the current majority in the Parliament, blame their opponents for the situation.
"If VMRO-DPMNE did not unreasonably block the election of the new Parliament speaker and the new Government we would have local elections and elected local authorities by now," SDSM said in a written statement.
For VMRO-DPMNE, the election of the new local authorities should not be connected to the establishment of the institutions at central level.
Nevertheless, the party refuses to take part in the consultations organized by Xhaferi because it does not recognize him as an elected speaker of the Parliament.
"The local elections have nothing to do with the formation of the new Government. They (SDSM) only demand excuses to postpone the local elections because they do not have courage to face the Macedonian people," VMRO-DPMNE said in a written statement on Monday.
His party proposed four possible dates for local elections -- July 2, September 17 or 24th and October 15. For SDSM the priority still remains in forming the new Government at central level and they have not commented this dates yet.
Macedonian territory locally is organized in 80 municipalities and the City of Skopje as a separate unit.
