Zoran Zaev
Zoran Zaev changed his country's name to settle an argument that had blocked it from NATO and the European Union for twenty-seven years. He came to power by publishing wiretaps. From 2015 his opposition party released recordings of some twenty thousand people - ministers, judges, journalists - made by the government's own security service, which showed election rigging and the covering up of a killing by police. The crisis took two years and European mediation to resolve, and he became prime minister in 2017. The name dispute was older than the state. Greece had objected since 1991 that Macedonia is a Greek region and the name implied a claim to it, and had vetoed accession to both organisations for as long as the question stood. Zaev and Alexis Tsipras signed the Prespa agreement in June 2018 on the shore of a lake the two countries share: the country would become North Macedonia in its constitution and everywhere else, and Greece would drop the veto. Neither man was thanked for it. The referendum that autumn was boycotted and fell short of the turnout threshold, and Zaev pushed the constitutional amendments through parliament anyway with opposition defectors. Tsipras lost the next Greek election. North Macedonia joined NATO in 2020. The European Union then declined to open accession talks because Bulgaria raised objections about language and history, which is the same shape of dispute with a different neighbour. He resigned in 2021 after losing local elections, having solved the problem that had defined the country and not the one that replaced it.
- Lived: 1974 CE – ?
- Nationality: Macedonian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
