Former top SDSM party official Sofija Kunovska, who has long criticized the course of the party, said that the Saturday’s congress was “theater of the absurd” and “another episode in SDSM’s agony”.

The congress of the once powerful SDSM looked like anything but a political event. Instead of an authentic political speech (from Filipce) we got a hybrid construction put together by alghoritms and nostalgia. A combination of artificial intelligence and a mechanically copied speech from Branko Crvenkovski from 2008, when he cried out that “you either are SDSM or not”. Then came the choir. A former party offcial, appointed a stage manager directed from Zaev’s Murtino, made sure that a dozen spontaneous speakers show up to signal support and adoration, writes Kunovska in a social media post, in which she signals support for the growing factions within SDSM, who blame Venko Filipce and Zoran Zaev of sabotaging the party in order to negotiate protection from criminal accountability for themselves.