A new citizens' alliance, Stop Operation Soros, was announced in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, on January 17. One its founders, Nikola Srbov, explained its purpose in a press conference.
"The Foundation Open Society, operating under the Soros umbrella, used its funding and personnel to support violent processes in Macedonia," he said. "It has monopolized the civil society sector, pushing out any organization which disagrees with the Soros ideology."
Another activist of Stop Operation Soros said that the main goal of the initiative will be the "de-Sorosization" of Macedonia.
What is behind this apparent upsurge of anti-Soros sentiment in Macedonia?
Nikola Gruevski, the head of the Macedonian ruling party (VMRO-DPMNE), also recently called for a "de-Sorosization" of Macedonian civil society. He said that the George Soros-funded Foundation Open Society Institute (FOOM) will not be prevented from operating in Macedonia but warned that he would not allow "foreign interests" to dominate the public sphere.
Gruevski’s attacks on foreign NGOs are surprising, given that many of his closest political allies, VMRO-DPMNE party members, and supporters of his government have had close links with FOOM. Several, including Gjorge Ivanov, who is now president of Macedonia, lawmaker Ilija Dimovski, and Jovan Donev, Macedonia's ambassador to London, have served on FOOM’s boards or in executive functions, while others have received scholarships and funding.
Yet in recent interviews and speeches, Gruevski has accused the NGOs and the opposition of trying to topple his government. The attacks on NGOs come in the wake of the December 11 general election in Macedonia, which his party -- in power since 2006 -- won with a reduced number of seats in parliament and which moves forward unsure of the continued support of its coalition partners. Gruevski is also under a cloud of suspicion related to the wiretapping scandal in which several members of VMRO-DPMNE and its business associates have been implicated.
"Gruevski sees Soros as the father of liberalism and a great threat to his authoritarian manner of running the country," Arsim Zekoli, a public relations expert told RFE/RL’s Macedonian unit.
Probably unaware of these developments, Soros published an essay under headline Open Society Needs Defending, which resonates perfectly with events in Macedonia:
"I am an 86-year-old Hungarian Jew who became a U.S. citizen after the end of World War II. I learned at an early age how important it is what kind of political regime prevails. The formative experience of my life was the occupation of Hungary by Hitler’s Germany in 1944."
Soros says that it is unlikely that he and his family would have survived if his father had not been prescient enough to arrange for false identities for all of them, and others.
After the war, he escaped from then-communist Hungary to England. As a student in London, he read the philosopher Karl Popper, under whose influence he developed his own philosophy:
"I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers' interests. […] I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed."
Although he admits that the binary classification is "too simplistic," he still finds the distinction between open and closed societies useful and has dedicated his life to defending the former and actively opposing the latter. However, he feels that we have reached a critical moment, when open societies -- and the democratic institutions and civic organizations that sustain them -- are under threat everywhere:
"I find the current moment in history very painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of closed societies -- from fascist dictatorships to mafia states -- are on the rise. How could this happen? The only explanation I can find is that elected leaders failed to meet voters' legitimate expectations and aspirations and that this failure led electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism. Quite simply, many people felt that the elites had stolen their democracy."
The disillusionment with what to many critics appears as sham democracy was clearly apparent in the recent antigovernment protests in Macedonia, a response to the wiretapping scandal and evidence of government corruption. Gruevski tried unsuccessfully to shut down the probe by the Prosecutor-General's Office, which only further enraged his opponents.
The recent scapegoating of foreign NGOs, and Soros in particular, appears designed to shift public attention to outside interference and consolidate his party’s weakening hold on power.