The Infringement of the Principle of Separation of Powers and the Domination of the Government in the Political System of the Republic of Macedonia

This paper is a critical analysis of the relationship between the legislative and executive power in the Republic of Macedonia. The model of organization of power is essential for any political system, including the Macedonian. The analysis starts from the principle of separation of powers, continues with its (non) implementation in the Republic of Macedonia and ends with conclusions and recommendations. The 1991 Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia inaugurated the system of separation of powers as a fundamental value of the constitutional order, abandoning the system of unity government (the assembly system), along with the one-party system, and substituting them with the multiparty parliamentary system. According to the principle of separation of powers, the power is divided into legislative, executive and judicial. The legislative authority is the Assembly, the executive is shared between the Government and the President, and the judicial power is exercised by the courts. The presidential, parliamentary and mixed/combined systems are based on the principle of division of powers. The Republic of Macedonia belongs to the group of mixed systems, dominated by elements of the parliamentary system, with relics of the assembly system or as Professor Gordana Siljanovska calls it: “the Macedonian constitutional cocktail of organization of power†. Nevertheless, parliamentary democracy is not determined only by the constitutional framework, it is also determined by the (un) democratic tradition, the model of political culture, as well as the electoral and party system. In this sense, the same normative model works differently in different countries or different periods of development of the same political system. This is especially evident in the relations between parliament and government. The dominance of the executive is not characteristic only of the model of organization of power in the Republic of Macedonia, it is also a global tendency. In this sense, the parliament of the Republic of Macedonia shares the ‘fate’ of the representative bodies in contemporary parliamentarism. However, in the absence of a democratic tradition, the presence of subject political culture, the strong elements of partocracy and the party state, the fragile and fragmented civil society, and the weak general public, give dramatic dimensions to the dominance of the executive over the legislative power.