Skopje, 12 May 2024 (MIA) - University Professor Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova is set to become North Macedonia’s sixth president and the first woman to hold the post.

Siljanovska-Davkova, who was backed by VMRO-DPMNE, beat incumbent President Stevo Pendarovski in the presidential run-off on May 8. According to the State Election Commission, she won 561.000 votes, while her opponent, Pendarovski, won 251.899 votes.

During her election campaign under the slogan "Macedonia, Proud Again," Siljanovska-Davkova said she would not use the adjective "North" but would stand in front of a sign with the new constitutional name of the country.  

She had also said she was against the constitutional changes to include the Bulgarian ethnic community in the Constitution, but if Parliament made this decision, she said she would honor it given that it was made by a constitution-making body.  

She told voters the fundamental values of the constitutional order should be respected, saying that the Prespa Agreement, for her, was an open question, politically and legally.

In her statement following her win on Wednesday, she pledged to be a President of all citizens.

"I will behave as the President of all citizens. This means of all ethnic groups, of all members of parties, of people who are not members of the parties – because no President can ask for unity while clinging to party lines," Siljanovska-Davkova said.

Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova (b. 1953, Ohrid) graduated from the Faculty of Law in Skopje in 1978. She received her PhD, cum laude, from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, with a dissertation on "Local Self-Government – Between Norms and Reality" in 1994.

She has taught Political System and Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law in Skopje. She has been a member of the Constitutional Commission of the Parliament (1990-1992), a government minister (1992-1994), a member of the Council of Europe's Group of Independent Experts on the European Charter of Local Self-Government, and a member of the Venice Commission. She has written dozens of papers on Constitutional Law and the Political System.

Siljanovska-Davkova was VMRO-DPMNE's presidential candidate also in 2019, when she lost to Stevo Pendarovski.

In the 2020 parliamentary elections, Siljanovska-Davkova headed VMRO-DPMNE's MP candidate list for the First Electoral District and received a parliamentary seat in August 2020.mr/ad/

Photo: MIA Archive