Historian, analyst and blogger Harald Schenker, who has lived in Macedonia since 1999 and is now moving to Switzerland, created social network buzz with his farewell post, addressed to a “failing Macedonia”, in which he provides a diagnosis for the country's demise and a plea for rebuilding Macedonian society. The article now has over 900 likes on Facebook and has been shared on Twitter over 80 times.

To me, and it gives me much pain to put this into plain words, Macedonia is in great danger of becoming a failing model. It is a structure that has not sought, and hence has not found, answers to crucial questions. I fail to understand how this can be, but I have to state it – that the intellectual carelessness of its self-styled elites is not only astonishing; it is an attitude that may cost them very dearly.