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Macedonia PM forms coalition with Albanian party 05 Jul 2008 15:07:52 GMT (adds details, quotes) By Kole Casule SKOPJE, July 5 (Reuters) - Macedonia's Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has agreed with the main ethnic Albanian party to form a coalition government that will try to get the country's NATO and EU bids back on track, his party said on Saturday. Gruevski's conservative VMRO-DPMNE has 63 seats in the 120-seat parliament but sought a partner from the 25-percent Albanian minority for the sake of stability and ethnic peace. The Democratic Union of Integration (DUI) was born out of a 2001 Albanian insurgency for greater rights. Macedonia came to the brink of an ethnic war but the lure of NATO and the European Union persuaded guerrillas to disarm and join politics. "After reviewing all the possible options, we decided to broaden our parliamentary majority in alliance with the DUI," said VMRO-DPMNE spokesman Ilija Dimovski. "This decision is the best for Macedonia." In his previous government in 2006, Gruevski sided with the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA), outraging the larger DUI. Western diplomats had said they preferred to see both Albanian parties join the government this time, after violence, fraud and intimidation in Albanian areas during a general election last month exposed deep divisions within the minority. Dimovski said Gruevski had initially hoped to get the two rival Albanian parties to join him into a grand coalition. "We proposed that both parties join the government," Dimovski said. "But both of them made it clear to us they were against that." The government's main priority will be to revive Skopje's bid for membership of NATO and to secure a date for accession talks with the EU. Both processes are now blocked by Greece. Athens vetoed an invitation for Macedonia to join NATO in April, demanding the country first change its chosen name, which is the same as Greece's northern province. The EU has said the 18-year-old name row must be resolved for Macedonia to get a date for membership talks, and that it will be watching to see how the country deals with the violence that marred the June 1 election. A re-run of the vote in ethnic Albanian areas in mid-June was mostly peaceful, but tensions persist. A shootout between supporters of the DUI and DPA in north-western Macedonia on Friday wounded several people. (Writing by Ellie Tzortzi; editing by Elizabeth Piper)
