Parliament confirmed Zaev’s request on Thursday, paving the way for his resignation. The head of government reacted to the poor performance of his party in the local elections. Deputy Finance Minister Dimitar Kovacevski will take over Zaev’s office in the coming days. He had recently been named party leader of the SDSM.
Zaev, who had been Prime Minister of North Macedonia since 2017, had lost a lot of approval in recent months. He had sought an economic recovery after the corona pandemic and without much success to start EU accession talks.
“It would be politically irresponsible and unjustifiable to my people and my country to continue to lead the government on its Euro-Atlantic path,” the politician said in his letter to parliament.
In the second round of local elections at the end of October, Zaev’s left-wing party SDSM had lost the capital Skopje and most of the country’s other major cities in the Western Balkans.
In 2018, Zaev agreed on the new country name Republic of North Macedonia in difficult negotiations with the then Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. He drew a line under a name dispute with Greece that had been going on since 1991.
From the perspective of Greece, the former name Macedonia, which the former Yugoslav republic had given itself after its independence, was part of the Greek national heritage and also marked a claim to the northern Greek province of Macedonia.
The settlement of the dispute paved the way for North Macedonia to become a member of NATO and to move closer to the EU. However, Zaev did not make any progress recently in the envisaged EU accession talks, with France and Bulgaria in particular blocking this.