Is it an ideology of political opinion or demagogy for realizing personal interests?

Are the political parties the only way to succeed and progress?

In the Balkans the “popularity” of the party memberships is not fading away any time soon. Unlike the countries in the region in which up to 15% of the population are registered as party members, the European average is 3.5% from the total population in the countries Less than a month ago, the Governing Social Democratic Union of Macedonia started the process to update and to actively register its membership. This means that 1563 teams from 74 Municipal Organization will be on field visiting the homes of their members. The expectations of the SDSM Leadership is that after the update is finished, they will have around 60.000 members. Meaning that approximately 3% of the population of the country is a member of the Governing party. However, the relatively high number of members of SDUM is not an isolated phenomena. According to data which we gathered from the Central Register, there are 65 Political Parties in North Macedonia. We excluded 15 which in the past local and Parliamentary elections realized some results and we asked them – how many members do they have? According to a high profiled official of VMRO-DPMNE, they have around 100.000 members. DUI informs that they have 75.000 members. The Democratic Union states that they have issued 34.000 membership cards, and the Alliance for Albanians 20.000. If you add up the numbers of the 12 parties that answered us, they alone have 351,500 members. If we use the estimates from “the book of facts of the CIA”, that North Macedonia has a population of 2.13 million citizens, this means that 16.5% of the population, or that every sixth citizen is a member of a political party. The reality is even scarier when a comparison is made of how many citizens in the developed countries have membership cards. Thus, if SDSM has about 3% of the population in the country, and VMRO-DPMNE about 4.7%, in Great Britain, for example, the ruling Boris Johnson Conservative Party has 191,000 members in a country of 66 million, only 0.29% of the population have membership cards of the Government! In Germany, the ruling party CDU of the Chancellor Angela Merkel has 407.000 members which is 0.5% of the German population. The party of the French President Emanuel Macron has around 420.000 members or nearly 0.63% of the population. However, as we go to the south of Europe, things change. The Governing HDZ in Croatia has 220.000 members in a country of four million citizens, which is 5.5% of the population. The absolute leader in the region is SNS from the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. The party has 750.000 members in a country which has nearly 7 million citizens, which is 10.71% of the population.

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