Orce Gjorgjievski today assumed to office of Mayor of Skopje. After a brief courtesy meeting with the outgoing Mayor Danela Arsovska, who he had accused of deliberately sabotaging the work of the public institutions, the new Mayor began a push to clean up the city. His campaign promise was that he will give the capital a thorough scrub in the first 72 hours.

Immediately this evening, trucks from the KHS communal hygiene company gathered at the Boris Trajkovski sports center parking lot, and from there took off across the city.

We are changing Skopje from the bottom up. We begin our first push this evening. We promised to clean the city in 72 hours. Tomorrow, we will begin to thoroughly reconstruct the public utility companies, to normalize the situation there and to have the city functioning normally again, Gjorgjievski said.

As Mayor Arsovska was losing political allies, due to her frequent fighting with VMRO-DPMNE – the party that had her elected, but also with other political parties, she began to rely more and more on DUI, and many of the key positions in the city are staffed by DUI officials. After a series of suspicious fires at the Drisla dump site during the summer, KHS stopped collecting garbage in the run up to the local elections. The two key managers from KHS, both of them DUI party officials, were arrested for endangering public health after the first round of the elections.