North Macedonia—Two Sides of the Same Coin Pleading for Democratisation from Below

This chapter looks at several larger protests between 2014 marked with the offspring of the student protests and the mobilisation against the so-called French Proposal in 2022, i.e. the country’s framework for starting negotiations with the European Union. Following a theoretical approach mostly based on Political Opportunity Structure (POS), this work looks into the complex relations between social movements, political parties and state institutions, and how social movement outcomes in Macedonia are largely dependent on this entangled relationship. Combining social movement literature (Bieber, 2018; della Porta & Diani in Social movements: An introduction. Wiley, 2020; Tilly and Tarrow in Contentious politics, 2015, etc.) with works on (de)democratisation (Huntington in Journal of Democracy 2:12, 1991; Levitsky and Way in Journal of Democracy 13:51–65, 2002; Zakaria in Foreign Affairs 76:22–43, 1997, etc.), this work analyses the oscillation of democratic processes and the plead for a better society for all. At the core of this analysis lay the interactions between contentious actors and their friends and foes. The central part of this work provides a holistic presentation of the key actors and events from several protest waves between 2014 and 2022, looking at critical junctures which triggered and/or shaped the outcomes of these mobilisations. All crucial actors, relationships, main grievances, developments and outcomes will be traced, analysed in detail and analytically explained. The common denominator of all analysed mobilisations is their anti-governmental character, amid their profound ideological differences.