The Grammar of Protest Publics in Skopje, Macedonia, May 2015

The Northern Republic of Macedonia saw its largest spontaneous assembly on 5 May 2015. A serious protest public resulted from this momentum in a site without a tradition of such movements. Technology played no small part; it allowed for mobilization in a new way and to learn from examples abroad when national media refused to report on social movements. Some local qualities were utilized in the organization of the movement—such as the use of communist-inspired plena—while other local characteristics were rejected, in particular, ethnic division between the majority population and the large Albanian minority. I studied the Macedonian movement #protestiram, and its subsequent iterations, because it challenged those characteristics that many thought were so well ingrained that they would never come to an end in the Balkans. This chapter is separated into three parts. Firstly, a brief theoretical section will outline the role counterpublics play in an electoral democracy. Using Michael Warner’s writing on counterpublics, I will particularly focus on how these are created to inform what circumstances are involved in developing a protest public. Section 2 will look directly at the first couple of weeks of the Macedonian demonstrations to further our understanding of how counterpublics are formed. In the formative stages of #protestiram, debates on how best to secure an effectual movement were taking place, and some of these are recounted. The question of what makes a counterpublic successful predominates the final part of this article. By reflecting on subsequent actions and changes of the protesting public in Skopje, I will attempt to make suggestions of what was done well and to good effect. Most important were acts that broke away from established forms of communication.