Menu
Menu
A society and political system grounded on democratic principles and values that continuously and relentlessly create fundaments for better common living. In short, these are our principles in the so-called societal-political corpus. The rudimentary democratic practices in the Macedonian society, and the slow brewing of the participative political culture are the primary focus of the Forum for Reasonable Policies.
A functioning Parliament and well-developed parliamentary practices constitute our particular interest. The Parliament is the most important locus of the political life and its democratic practices create indispensable bases for the full-bloom parliamentary democracy. For us, the model of the British Parliament is the cornerstone towards which the Macedonian Parliament and all parliaments in the region should aspire. Therefore, the Forum for Reasonable Policies will develop policies and projects specifically dealing with parliamentarism as a pivotal democratic principle. Forum for Reasonable Policies believes that democracy and parliamentarism are dynamic processes that need to undergo a multi-year stages of learning, adaptation to local customs/practices, building on domestic positive practices and prudent application of the best European and Anglo-Saxon experiences (trial & error).
Political parties are inevitable agents and mediators in a democracy. Unfortunately, the 25-years Macedonian experience with multi-partism shows serous signs of misunderstanding and abuse of party politics as a fundament for sustaining ideological positions, which thereafter are projected at the state level in a democratic and non-autocratic way. Macedonian political parties, and most of the political parties in the region of SEE, show rather strong authoritarian tendencies, high levels of clientelism, low levels of intra-party democracy and nearly no ideological basis. The ideological cacophony, in our belief, is a reflection of the lack of liberal democratic preconditions within the political parties and within the society, preconditions which in turn would enable development of ideological specificities of each political party separately.
The Forum for Reasonable Policies stands for a thorough reform of the political parties, without which the country and the society could not develop in a stable and sustainable parliamentary democracy. Therefore, we work on a gradual but systematic reform of political parties. We advocate an electoral model that would dampen the so-called “double party duopoly“ (two pivotal ethnic Macedonian parties + two ethnic Albanian parties) which exchange their power seats in every electoral cycle and form huge pre-electoral coalitions which de facto weakens the resistance of the democratic processes in the country. Keeping the so-called “vital center” alive, as liberal-democratic precondition of every democratic process, is the starting point on which we will build our societal standpoints and project activities.
The region of SEE, and Macedonia in particular, suffer from highly politicized and overburdened public administration. This is a particularly important factor that drags down the entire society, foments clientelistic relationships and disables the long term development of the country. Forum for Reasonable Policies works on the decomposition of the nexus political parties- public administration as a key precondition for economic, political and social progress in the country. The reform of the public administration starts from transformation of public consciousness which is a direct consequence of the transformation of political parties’ attitudes towards this problem. However, this reform could be successful only if there exists a wide societal and notably political/party consensus.
Interethnic relations in a fragile multi-ethnic society permanently create frictions and latent fears that constitute fertile soil for political manipulation. Macedonia does not have any other choice than to continuously upgrade the social, political and economic aspects of multi-ethnic living. In that sense, the Forum for Reasonable Policies aims to signal, alarm and offer creative, sustainable and common sense solutions regarding the “open” ethnic issues, with an unequivocal intention to discuss the “hard ethnic issues” rather than to put them under the carpet. Our basic attitude in that regard is that the relations between ethnic communities in the country should not be seen through the prism of “giving or taking certain civil, political and economic rights”, but through a genuine debate based on the common sense and which is reflection of the real needs, possibilities and capacities of a certain political conjuncture.
Finally, populism, stemming for all variations and ideological backgrounds remains one of the most resilient impediments to the sustainable political and democratic development. Populism creates a vicious circle in the political activities and mutually “feeds” the political elites in a way that cannot bring anything good or valuable to the community. The Forum for Reasonable Policies permanently postulates the common sense long-term approach against the palliative doses of every-day populism, thereby analytically deconstructing the populist myths which come from all sides of the ideological spectrum.
Gordan Georgiev is co-founder and President of the Forum for Reasonable Policies. He has been active in the civil sector for 20 years. Georgiev was Executive Director of Forum-CSRD, one of the leading think tanks in Macedonia, and Director of the Macedonian School of Politics, under the auspices of Council of Europe and part of the regional network of Schools of Politics comprising 15 countries from the Balkans, Russia and CIS.
He was also engaged in projects at the Centre d’Etudes de Relations Internationales (CERI) in Paris and in the mission of Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation’s projects in Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. He is an expert for Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and has been working as an expert and independent consultant for Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) and other international bodies.
His expertise includes research and field projects on democratic stabilization, reconciliation, inter-ethnic relations, political parties’ reform and consolidation, regional political cooperation, international relations and regional security issues, reform of the parliamentary practices, decentralisation and reform of the local-self government.
From 2009 to 2013, Georgiev was elected as MP in the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia (SDSM), chairing the Committee on Culture.
He holds a BSc and MSc from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France, in Political Science and International Relations, and he obtained M.A. in European Studies from King’s College London. In 2009 he accomplished the Harvard Executive Education programme. Georgiev obtained his PhD in political sciences in 2016, dealing with societal system theories and structures of power.
Apart his contributions in many regional and international journals, Georgiev is a contributing author in “Problems of Representative Democracy in Europe” ed. by Jan Marius Wiersma (2014, Vangennep Amsterdam) and in “Reshaping the image of the political parties in SEE” ed. by Georgi Karasimeonov (2007).
Naum Naumovski – Borche, 50 / 3 – 12
1000 Skopje, Macedonia
frp@frp.mk
+389(0)70388928
Built with care by Martin Stojanovski
