Politics & Power Quote by Boris Trajkovski

Democracy here isn’t romance; it’s damage control. Trajkovski’s line reads like calm counsel, but its real job is to narrow the permissible range of political behavior. “While there continues to be differences” concedes conflict as an ongoing condition, not a glitch to be patched. That small clause lowers the temperature: you don’t win by pretending unity exists, you win by preventing disagreement from metastasizing into violence.

The moral center of the sentence sits in “the important point,” a phrase that quietly reorders priorities. Not agreement. Not even reconciliation. Procedure. The insistence that both “citizens and elected officials” must play by the same rules is the subtextual power move: in fragile democracies, elites often treat legality as optional and ask the public for patience anyway. Trajkovski refuses that asymmetry. He binds leaders to the same democratic discipline they demand from everyone else, making legitimacy a shared obligation rather than a lecture from above.

Context matters. As president of North Macedonia during the post-Yugoslav, post-conflict early 2000s, Trajkovski governed in the shadow of ethnic tension and the fresh memory of armed confrontation. In that setting, “democratic and legal avenues” isn’t civics-class boilerplate; it’s a barricade against the shortcut logic of militias, street power, and backroom coercion. The sentence is intentionally plain because it’s meant to be repeatable, quotable, and enforceable as a norm. It’s a statesman’s attempt to make process feel like patriotism when passions are begging for a faster, uglier answer.