North Macedonia's politics: an Assembly that counts some votes twice

How the Assembly counts a second majority

The rule sits in Article 69 of the constitution, as rewritten by Amendment X in 2001. An ordinary law passes with a majority of the representatives present, provided at least a third of the whole Assembly votes for it. A law that directly affects culture, the use of language, education, personal documentation or the use of symbols needs that majority and a second one inside it: a majority of the votes of the representatives present who belong to communities not in the majority in the population.

Amendment XVI adds a second list. The laws on local finances, local elections, the boundaries of municipalities and the City of Skopje pass on the same double count, and the law on local self-government as a whole needs two-thirds of all representatives with a majority of the non-majority members inside the two-thirds.

Who counts as belonging to a community is the representative's own declaration. The Ohrid text speaks of representatives "claiming to belong" to the communities not in the majority, and the second tally is taken among them. What falls inside the protected list is itself a matter for a vote. Where members disagree about whether a bill touches language, education or symbols, the Committee for Inter-Community Relations decides by majority whether the double procedure applies.

Why the rule arrived with a ceasefire

The constitution adopted on 17 November 1991 already had a body for this. Its Article 78 set up a Council for Inter-Ethnic Relations, chaired by the President of the Assembly, with two members each from the Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Vlachs and Romanies and two from other nationalities. The Assembly was obliged to consider its appraisals and to make decisions on them. It had no vote over the Assembly's own votes.

The decade that followed produced the demands that changed that. The Party for Democratic Prosperity, the most prominent of the Albanian parties of the 1990s, asked for extended education rights, wider use of Albanian, constitutional change and a proportional voting system. In 1999 the Kosovo War brought about 340,000 Albanian refugees into the country, by the count in the Wikipedia history of the period; the main Wikipedia article on the country gives an estimated 360,000.

Fighting between the government and ethnic Albanian insurgents of the National Liberation Army ran from February to August 2001, mostly in the north and west and around Tetovo, Skopje and Kumanovo. The insurgents demanded that the constitution be rewritten to write in Albanian language rights. The settlement was the Framework Agreement, concluded at Ohrid and signed at Skopje on 13 August 2001 by the president and the leaders of four parties, two Macedonian and two Albanian, and countersigned by special representatives of the European Union and the United States.

Its first principle rejected violence "completely and unconditionally". Its second ruled out "territorial solutions to ethnic issues". The rest of the text is procedure. The agreement attached its constitutional amendments as an annex and bound the parties to adopt them within 45 days of signature, and in the same weeks 3,500 NATO soldiers collected the insurgents' weapons in Operation Essential Harvest.

The Committee for Inter-Community Relations replaced the old council, with its composition written into the constitution. It has 19 members: seven Macedonians, seven Albanians and one each from the Turks, Vlachs, Roma, Serbs and Bosniaks. Where a community has no representative in the Assembly, the Public Attorney proposes the member after consulting that community.

Which offices need the votes of both

The Ohrid agreement carried the double count past legislation and into appointments. The Constitutional Court has nine judges, elected by the Assembly for nine years with no second term. Six are elected by a majority of all representatives. The other three need that majority with a majority of the non-majority representatives inside it.

The same procedure elects the Public Attorney, the ombudsman who protects citizens against the state administration and who holds an eight-year term with one re-election. The 2001 amendments told the office to give particular attention to non-discrimination and to equitable representation of communities in public bodies. Three members of the seven-member Republican Judicial Council, the body that nominates judges to the Supreme Court, are chosen the same way.

Two further provisions work by instruction. The president appoints three members of the Security Council and must ensure that the council as a whole equitably reflects the composition of the population. And "equitable representation of persons belonging to all communities in public bodies at all levels" was added to Article 8 as one of the fundamental values of the constitutional order. A later amendment extended the principle to prosecutors, whose election by the Council of Public Prosecutors must observe it.

The police got a timetable. Annex C committed the parties to police services that would "generally reflect the composition and distribution of the population" by 2004, starting with 500 new officers from non-majority communities hired and trained by July 2002 and 500 more by July 2003. Local police chiefs were to be selected by municipal councils from lists of candidates proposed by the Ministry of Interior.

Where the language threshold falls

The constitution now names one official language throughout the country and in its international relations: Macedonian, written in Cyrillic. It then adds that any other language spoken by at least 20% of the population is also an official language, written in its own alphabet, and it never names that language. Because the threshold is written as a share, the text needs no second language named in it.

The 2021 census counted 1,836,713 people. Of those, 1,344,815 declared that they spoke Macedonian and 507,989 declared Albanian, about 27.7% of the total. Turkish was declared by 71,757 people, Romani by 38,528 and Serbian by 24,773. Only Albanian clears the national line, and since 2019 it has been co-official at state level for everything except defence, the central police and monetary policy.

The same 20% applies inside each municipality. Where a fifth of a municipality's population speaks a language, that language and its alphabet are official there alongside Macedonian and Cyrillic. Where fewer do, the council decides. Turks made up nearly 4% of the population in 2021 and form a majority in two municipalities, Plasnica and Centar Župa, and in those two Turkish is an official language of the municipality.

The rule reaches the documents people carry. A citizen who speaks an official language other than Macedonian is issued personal documents in that language as well, and anyone may write to a main office of the central government in any official language and receive a reply in it alongside Macedonian.

How the municipalities became a second arena

Local government has been redrawn three times since 1996. Before 1996 there were 34 administrative districts. In September 1996 there were 123 municipalities. In August 2004 the Assembly passed a law cutting them to 84 and redrawing their boundaries, giving greater local autonomy to ethnic Albanians in the areas where they predominate. A merger in 2013 brought the number to 80, ten of which together form the City of Skopje.

The 2004 boundaries were the Ohrid agreement's decentralisation made concrete. The agreement had listed the competences to move downward: public services, urban and rural planning, environmental protection, local economic development, culture, local finances, education, social welfare and health care. Amendment XVII wrote the same list into the constitution.

Moving that much power to municipalities made their boundaries a question of which community would govern where. That is why the boundary law sits on the double-majority list, and why the census matters beyond statistics: the agreement tied the revision of municipal boundaries to "a new census", and whether a language is official in a given town depends on its share of that town's population. Britannica's account, revised in 2026, has Albanians forming majorities in some 16 of the 80 municipalities.

Why constitutional change runs through two-thirds

Article 131 makes the procedure deliberately slow. Two-thirds of all representatives must vote to begin a change. The draft is then confirmed by a simple majority of all members and put to public debate. The final decision needs two-thirds again. Since 2001 a change to the preamble, the local government articles, the community articles or Article 131 itself also needs a majority of the non-majority members inside the two-thirds.

In a chamber of 120, two-thirds is 80 votes. That figure has governed the country's foreign relations, because the settlements with Greece in 1995 and 2018, and the one Bulgaria asked for in 2022, each required a constitutional amendment.

The first came early. Amendments I and II, promulgated on 6 January 1992, declared that the republic had no territorial pretensions towards any neighbouring state and that it would not interfere in the sovereign rights or internal affairs of other states. Greece imposed a trade blockade in February 1994 and lifted it in September 1995, after the republic changed its flag and the parts of its constitution that Athens read as a right to intervene in the affairs of other countries.

The Prespa Agreement with Greece, signed on 17 June 2018, required the name "Republic of North Macedonia" to be written into the constitution "en bloc with one amendment" and set the end of 2018 as the deadline. A referendum on 30 September 2018 returned 91% in favour on a turnout of 37%, and it was not carried, because Article 73 requires more than half of all registered voters to take part. The Assembly went ahead on its own authority. It approved the draft amendment on 3 December 2018 by 67 votes to 23, with four abstentions, and adopted the final changes on 11 January 2019 with 81 votes, one more than the two-thirds line. The renaming took effect on 12 February 2019.

The next demand came from Bulgaria. A French proposal agreed in 2022 required North Macedonia to write the Bulgarian minority into its constitution. The Assembly passed the proposal in July 2022 and accession talks with the European Union opened that month. The amendment itself needed two-thirds, and the Social Democratic Union, which led the government, could not assemble it. The European Commission's progress report of 2023 cited the unfulfilled constitutional changes as the main obstacle. After the 2024 election the new government's stated position was that it would not accept the French proposal until ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria gained representation equal to that of other minorities there.

How the Assembly is elected and governments formed

The constitution allows 120 to 140 representatives, elected for four years; the Assembly has 120. They are chosen by closed-list proportional representation in six constituencies of 20 seats each. Three further seats are reserved for voters abroad and are filled only when diaspora turnout is high enough. A representative's mandate cannot be revoked, and the Assembly dissolves itself when more than half of its members vote to.

The election of 2024 shows how the chamber divides.

Turnout was 55%. Two of those lists, the European Front and VLEN, represent national minorities, and after repeat voting in Ohrid, Struga and other places on 22 May 2024 one seat moved from the first to the second. The largest list finished three seats short of 61, the number for a majority of the whole chamber.

The president nominates a mandator from the majority party or parties, who proposes a government for the Assembly to elect. Ministers cannot sit in the Assembly. In practice, government formation has been a negotiation across the communal line. In 2006 VMRO-DPMNE brought the Democratic Party of Albanians into government in place of the Democratic Union for Integration, which had won most Albanian votes, and protests followed in Albanian-populated areas. After the 2008 election VMRO-DPMNE and the Democratic Union for Integration governed together. In January 2022 a Social Democratic cabinet with two ethnic Albanian parties won its confidence vote by 62 to 46.

The Assembly's own offices are part of the same balance. In April 2017 about 200 protesters, reportedly mostly from VMRO-DPMNE, stormed the chamber after the election of Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian and a former commander of the National Liberation Army, as its speaker.

What the president holds and when elections repeat

The president is elected directly for five years, at most twice, and must be at least 40 years old and resident in the country for ten of the previous fifteen years. A candidate needs 10,000 voters or 30 representatives to be nominated. The office is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and chairs the Security Council, appoints ambassadors, proposes two judges of the Constitutional Court and two members of the Judicial Council, and grants pardons. Everything else in the executive belongs to the government.

The president may refuse to sign a law. The Assembly then reconsiders it, and if it passes again by a majority of all members the president must sign. A law passed by two-thirds cannot be refused at all.

The turnout rules can void a presidential election. The first round is won only with a majority of all registered voters. In a second round the 1991 text required more than half of registered voters to take part; Amendment XXXI lowered that to more than 40%. If the threshold is missed, the whole election is repeated. The turnout that sank the Prespa referendum in 2018, 37%, would have failed even the lower presidential line.

Where North Macedonia stands with NATO and Brussels

The country joined the United Nations on 8 April 1993 under the provisional reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", because Greece objected to the name. It joined the Council of Europe and the OSCE in 1995 and the World Trade Organization in 2003. It applied to the European Union in March 2004 and was listed as a candidate on 17 December 2005.

From 2005 until the Prespa settlement the name blocked both alliances. At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 Greece vetoed an invitation, and the European Union made settlement of the dispute a condition for opening talks. The Prespa Agreement tied the two together in its own text: Greece's support for a NATO invitation was conditional on the completion of the constitutional amendments, and Greece would ratify the accession protocol once they were done. The protocol was signed on 6 February 2019 and North Macedonia became a NATO member on 27 March 2020. As of 2024 its army had 8,000 active personnel and 4,850 reservists, and conscription had ended in 2007.

The European Union track has moved more slowly. Bulgaria refused the negotiating framework on 17 November 2020, and on 25 September 2024 the Union separated Albania's accession path from North Macedonia's because of the dispute between Skopje and Sofia. The World Bank's country overview, read in 2026, describes the government's 2024 to 2028 programme as prioritising growth and reforms oriented towards the Union. The North Macedonia: history article follows the dispute over the preamble itself, and North Macedonia: geography the lakes and borders that the three neighbours share.