SKOPJE, Macedonia — Macedonia will hold early elections next April under a tentative deal to defuse a political crisis that has been rocking the country for months, a mediator said.
The agreement was announced Tuesday after eight hours of negotiations among top political leaders.
The mediator of the talks, Johannes Hahn, the European Union commissioner for enlargement, announced the plan for early elections. In the meantime, voting rolls will be examined and irregularities resolved, and other changes will be made to election laws to level the playing field between the conservative governing party, its left-wing opposition and other parties.
The question of who will lead Macedonia until then will be negotiated, beginning next week in Brussels. Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski leads the increasingly authoritarian government, which has been under fire for months over a wiretapping scandal.
As part of the agreement, Mr. Gruevski, Zoran Zaev of the opposition Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, and the leaders of two smaller parties representing the country’s Albanian minority made no public statements after the talks.
Since February, Mr. Zaev has released excerpts taken from what he said were more than 670,000 phone conversations involving more than 20,000 phone numbers secretly made by the government and leaked to the opposition. Included on the tapes were discussions by government officials of vote rigging, judge buying and the cover-up of murders.
Mr. Gruevski has denied the government was behind the recordings and blamed the intelligence services of an unnamed foreign country, working with the opposition to topple him.
Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets demanding Mr. Gruevski’s resignation, while similar crowds have come out in his support.
