Election marks latest hurdle in Macedonia recovery

Macedonia holds local elections on Sunday that will be a fresh test of its commitment to multi-ethnic power sharing.

The polls in the impoverished Balkan country are to be held under a reworked power arrangement designed to give the 25 per cent Albanian minority greater local authority.

Voters will elect officials tasked with implementing the changes, the final part of the Ohrid accord brokered by the West with Albanian rebels in 2001 to prevent a new Balkan civil war.

The West is watching closely, impatient to see the peace accord finally in place. Nato and the European Union have conditioned Macedonia's integration on its full passage.

Violence has flared in the past, notably in the southwestern town of Struga where nationalist Macedonians rioted last July against the prospect of a change in the ethnic balance of power.

Diplomats warned there could "isolated incidents" again this time but said the overall picture looked hopeful.

The law devolves power over health, education and economic development. Macedonian nationalists argued it would widen the ethnic divide and encourage Albanian separatists but their bid to overturn it in a referendum in November fell flat.

It also makes Albanian the second language in the capital, Skopje, whose borders are widened to take in more Albanians.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group think-tank has warned opposition parties hostile to the deal could do well in Sunday's poll, drawing on a general malaise among voters.

"The considerable progress Macedonia has made is still fragile," said its report "Macedonia: Not out of the Woods Yet."

But one Western diplomat said the assessment was "jaded". "Hopefully the elections will go well and they can start putting into action what they promised to do," he told Reuters, noting that "90 per cent of the population wants to join the EU".

The seven-month insurgency in 2001 pushed Macedonian to the brink of civil war a decade after it peacefully broke away from collapsing Yugoslavia. With the Ohrid Accord, Albanian rebels laid down their arms and went into politics, joining the Socialist-led ruling coalition.

Albanians make up a quarter of Macedonia's two million people, living mainly in the north and west of the country on the borders with Albania and Kosovo, Serbia's Albanian-dominated province governed by the United Nations since 1999.

Analysts say stability is essential if Macedonia is to cope with any fallout from a potentially explosive decision expected later this year on whether Kosovo becomes independent, as Kosovo Albanians demand, or remains nominally part of Serbia.