"If we take the regime down with colour, that is art," Anna Krkulj told me at her home, overlooking the Macedonian capital. Protestors in Macedonia had been out on the streets virtually every day during the spring of 2016, calling for an end to government corruption and impunity. They covered buildings with paint in what became dubbed the Colourful Revolution. The protestors target government institutions and buildings that are synonymous with the problems, said one of the leaders of the movement, Alexandar Bogoevski.
In a country born from the former Yugoslavia, and a recent history marked by ethnically driven conflict, the protest movement is the first time that the different ethnicities have come together, against the government. "We will not tolerate any violence. We believe the regime will fall with protest action" says Mr. Bogoevski. And the government has ceded to some of the protestors' demands: presidential pardons against politicians implicated in a huge wiretapping scandal were rescinded, and activists placed under house-arrest at the beginning of the protests have been released. "Either the revolution will win and we will win in a free society, according to Western standards, or we will live under a brutal regime, … we will fall into dictatorship" said Mr. Bogoevski.
Another protestor, Jakov Spasov, described the implications of failure: "if this doesn't work then we'll have to leave the country."
