Macedonian leaders breathed a sigh of relief today evening, as nothing worse than bad weather troubled presidential and local polls, closely watched as an important test of the country's political and democratic maturity, according to dpa. Elections authorities were expected to announce shortly after the 7 pm (1800 GMT) end of voting who made it to the likely second round of voting on April 5. Pre-election surveys gave a clear advantage to Georgi Ivanov, put forward by the nationalist VMRO-DPMNE, which has run the government after a landslide victory in troubled parliamentary polls last June. In the run-off, Ivanov was likely to face either the opposition Social Democrats' Ljubomir Frckovski, or Imer Selmani, an emerging leader from the restive ethnic Albanian minority.
