How Paint Became a Weapon in Macedonia's 'Colorful Revolution'

Look at the aftermath of recent protests in the Macedonian capital Skopje, and you might assume a festival had just left town. Archways appear splattered with polkadot blotches of color, statues drip pink and blue streaks, and fountain water runs scarlet. This colorful makeover isn’t the result of some Balkan version of Holi, however. It’s the product of a protest movement whose dazzling tactics—dubbed Sharena Revolutsiya or “the colorful revolution” despite its overwhelmingly peaceful nature—has meant covering city walls and monuments in splashes of brightly colored paint. While it all looks like fun on social media, the protests, involving tens of thousands of people, express deep frustration, part of unrest that has been rocking the tiny but geopolitically significant Balkan republic for over a year.

Macedonia’s Colorful Revolution actually kicked off last winter following shocking revelations over the scope of alleged state surveillance in the country. Over 20,000 citizens, it emerged, had had their phones tapped—a sizable number in a country of barely more than two million. The opposition claimed the wiretaps were a government-designed plot not just to monitor opponents, but to help fix last year’s elections in favor of former PM Nikola Gruevski’s political party, VMRO-DPMNE (and possibly the most unwieldy political acronym ever coined). In addition, they claim that almost 500,000 names on the country’s electoral register were invalid, belonging to people who were dead or to émigrés who had long left the country.