On the afternoon of April 27 several hundred Macedonians stormed the parliament building in downtown Skopje. Most were state employees, some wrapped in Macedonian flags, others wearing balaclavas, a small number armed with knives and handguns. They had spent their mornings driving busses or grading papers or directing traffic. One of their leaders, Igor Durlovski, managing director of the Macedonia Ballet and Opera, was scheduled to put on Cleopatra at the theater that evening. “Revolutions begin in Macedonia!” ran the cheers. “Throw out the occupiers!” The enemy today was not the Ottoman Empire but the Open Societies Foundations. Durlovksi and tens of thousands of others are convinced George Soros is behind a slow-motion coup in Skopje that is replacing an elected center-right government with a coalition of leftists and Albanians bent on destroying the Macedonian state. Spotting the throng, police units tasked with guarding the parliament opened its doors, ushered them in, then locked the building. In the ensuing two hours more than 100 were injured, including three MPs. “This attack was planned out days in advance,” Ljupco Nikolovski, the ex-Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Water who took a camera tripod to the head, told me.

The Republic of Macedonia is the ongoing catastrophe at the heart of the Balkans. Its former prime minister, Nikola Gruevksi, would be sitting in a jail cell today were he not still stage-managing his former state as a private citizen. Two years ago he resigned from office following revelations that he and his spy chief cousin had overseen the most extensive surveillance program in Europe since the dismantling of the Stasi. Among the 20,000 handpicked Macedonians swept up in Gruevski’s surveillance net was his own inner circle, the so-called Familija. The transcripts, made available to the public by a whistleblower, are color commentary for a near-decade of mafia rule that drove Macedonia beneath Qatar on the World Press Freedom Index (“(Boškoski, a political opponent) was lying down for 40 minutes, everybody was watching. The police cuffed him with his head on the toilet. I fucked him right, didn’t I?”), clinched electoral majorities by sending hundreds of thousands of deceased Macedonians to the polls (“Their ID cards are already printed, but there’s one tricky thing: We need more addresses. We can’t have 50 people claiming to live in a 40-square-meter apartment”), and captured a fattened public sector with ruthless efficiency (“You don’t need to persuade state employees to vote for us. Just sack them if they don’t”).

Gruevki’s most contentious achievement remains Skopje, a capital which can now make a strong case for being the most bewildering city in Europe or any other continent. Picture Pompeii retrofitted for the Las Vegas Strip. The banks of the Vardar River are now overrun with a glittering Classical theme park of faux-marble porticoes and choreographed fountains-cum-light shows and bronze statuary. Among the admissions of murder and racketeering and nepotism, the wiretaps also revealed the architect of the new Skopje to be none other than Gruevski himself; failures at professional boxing, acting and spycraft have exposed his true calling as a visionary of Olympian-scale totalitarian kitsch. (“The columns we saw on our trip to Washington were Classical columns. I want Baroque for Skopje.”) Hundreds of pseudo-Hellenistic statues, many equipped with cameras to observe passersby, blast Wagner across city squares layered with black and white bathroom tiles. Near a statue of a teething Alexander the Great suckling his mother’s breast, a replica of the London Eye emerges out of the Vardar, moored in turn by three concrete pirate ships. Beyond infuriating the Greeks, and deliberately making the ethnically-Albanian quarter of Macedonia’s population feel like foreigners in their own capital, Skopje’s Disneyfication has vastly enriched Gruevski and friends: hundreds of millions of euros in construction kickbacks, most now stashed away in Central America, will indebt Macedonia for generations to come. “Now we really are Greece,” a street cleaner called Jovan told me as he picked leaves out of a fountain watered by four vomiting gilded horses.

A year ago, when I met Zoran Zaev, the head of Macedonia’s center-left and the leading light of the anti-Gruevski resistance, the crisis appeared to be tilting to his advantage. The wiretapping scandal had forced Gruevski, at least ceremoniously, out of power; each night some 50,000 Macedonians took to the streets demanding his imprisonment; they threw buckets of paint on his monuments in a “Colorful Revolution”; ethnic Albanians who had rarely ever shown any interest in the politics of their Slavic counterparts were coming out in droves on Zaev’s behalf, convinced that their own political elites had enriched themselves under Gruevski while overlooking his party’s racism (“Why not make a war on the Albanians? We can crush them in an hour”); the European Union, which for years had nothing to say as Gruevski used their cash handouts to dismantle an already pseudo-democracy, demanded that fair elections be held. Even most of Gruevski’s supporters believed that Zaev would be in power before long.

Two weeks ago, when I met Zaev again, he looked exhausted. Gashes, courtesy of a pro-Gruevski folding chair launched his way at the parliament brawl, ran across his forehead; his lip was stitched up. Electoral lists insufficiently cleared of illegal voters—tens of thousands of Macedonians had a ballot but no pulse—had denied him a December election victory by fewer than 15,000 votes. The failure of Gruevski’s party to form a coalition had swung the opportunity back in Zaev’s favor, but his mandate to form a government was now being illegally upheld by rightwing loyalists still crammed within the state. Gruevski had instructed his following to organize themselves into street groups that were now marching around the city each night. “De-Sorosization” had begun. Every morning, Gruevski’s people were barging into the offices of dozens of NGOs across Skopje and confiscating hard drives; a worker at the Open Societies Foundations told me they were scouring for any clues they could find that Zaev and Soros had been in communication. Meanwhile, the Albanian politicians Zaev relied on to form a common anti-Gruevski front had taken the remarkable step of convening in Tirana and issuing a manifesto of their demands: Albanian flags raised above all public buildings; Albanian language taught in all schools; the abolition of all border crossings into Albania and Kosovo.

Yesterday, after months of obstruction, Zaev was finally granted the mandate and took power. His challenge now is to dislodge from the state a cartel regime that half the Macedonian population believes is the state. This requires unclipping all the networks of power forged during the Gruevski decade—everything from the smuggling entrepreneurs that work the borders to the crony village mayors out in the countryside to the labyrinth of secret services in Skopje, tens of thousands of political appointees infused into the bureaucratic patchwork, many of whom may lose their positions or worse and so are more than willing to answer Gruevski’s call to violence. When I last talked to him, I had asked Zaev if he had any historical models in mind for how to de-colonize a captured state. There were plenty of examples, he said, many right here around the Balkans. But the trouble with Macedonia is that it isn’t anything like those states.

Beyond the corruption lies the ethnic problem. The notoriously uncertain identity of three quarters of Macedonia’s population—the Slavic Macedonians—and the visceral ethnic pride of the other quarter—the Albanian Macedonians—guarantees a kind of kinetic volatility to the country’s politics. If one thing is clear, for Macedonia to resolve its present crisis it will be necessary to destroy downtown Skopje even as it continues to be built. The identity it espouses—a brazen Greek imperial one that Gruevski has pumped into everything from textbooks to text messages informing arriving tourists they have reached the cradle of civilization—makes the country a pariah with its larger and more powerful member to its south, and alienates a quarter of its population. Nothing will change unless the bronze muses and priestesses and charioteers go the way of their creator. Already in Skopje you hear talk of which monuments might be auctioned off abroad as antiquarian trinkets and which might be melted down to stave off creditors of the ballooning debt. A 1963 earthquake destroyed more than three quarters of the city; some Macedonians are holding out for a repeat performance.

For Gruevski’s supporters, many of whom have been convinced of their Alexander the Great heritage, Zaev masks a still greater threat. It comes from Albania. It is one thing that the Albanians, Europe’s poorest and fastest growing population, want equal representation in Macedonian police forces, quite another that schools all across Macedonia, even in swathes of the country that have zero Albanians living in them, ought to be teaching Albanian to their students. If you are a Slavic Macedonian—denied a distinct ethnic identity by every single one of your neighbors—the present moment must feel like a final assault. Today it means hoisting up the Albanian flag. When the Albanians become the majority population in Macedonia, it may mean pulling down the Macedonian flag. This could happen sooner than anyone anticipates, but it’s hard to tell—no census has been held since 2002.

With the Albanians, the implicit threat is always Kosovo’s experience at the hands of the Serbs in 1999. They took up arms there; they could in Macedonia as well. I took a bus out to the Šar foothills along the Albanian-Kosovo border. Here the short-lived uprising of 2001—when several thousand local Albanians and Kosovo veterans nearly succeeded in forging their own state—still consumed café gossip. Graffiti scrawled out emblems of the National Liberation Army; on this street, a group of teenagers in the city of Tetovo told me, a Macedonian state police car was blown up. But there was also much talk here of the Albanians’ own failures in Macedonia since independence. Their elites had never had any qualms about collaborating with Gruevski; Ali Ahmeti, the one-time Leninist who led the National Liberation Army, ruled in coalition with him. Was it worth it? Though they were no longer the second-class citizens as they had been throughout the 1990s, the Albanians in places like Tetovo were also not convinced their circumstances were improving. Across the mountains, Albania was a success story, entering NATO in 2009 and now on track to enter the EU; their own villages by contrast lay in disrepair even as their tax dollars got funneled to Skopje to prop up a pseudo-Greek identity they wanted nothing to do with.

The interethnic conflict is the lesser aspect of the Macedonian crisis, but it absorbs the brunt of the international coverage. Gruevski wants this. He stands his best chance at avoiding a jail sentence if he convinces Macedonia and its observers that the present conflict is a looming civil war that only he can help avert. He has already demonstrated what lengths he is willing to go to give this impression. Two years before last month’s parliamentary attack, while mass protests against the wiretaps were ongoing in Skopje, he appeared to manufacture the most violent episode in the Balkans this decade: Albanian drug dealers and Slavic state police officers dispatched from Skopje clashed under extraordinarily suspicious circumstances in the city of Kumanovo. Eighteen were gunned down; Gruevski took to TV with claims that a second uprising was in the works; Macedonia’s problem was the Albanians, not the wiretaps.

The Albanian political elites often manage to play right into this narrative. The demands issued from Tirana were so preposterous that many Macedonians contend that Gruevski’s people covertly authored them. “The Albanian looked lifted from Google Translate,” a worker in the Helsinki Foundation told me. The April 27 assaults was triggered by Zaev’s decision to designate Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian, as Speaker of the parliament. Xhaferi has a controversial past—the United States declared him a terrorist in 2001 for commanding a National Liberation Army regiment—but the nationalists’ outrage at his appointment conveniently overlooked the years Xhaferi served as Gruevski’s minister of defense. When the chaos from the parliament attack had subsided and Xhaferi did take the podium, he seized the first possible opportunity to raise the Albanian flag in parliament. The indignation was shared by the pro-Gruevski Macedonians as well as many pro-Zaev ones: Why the blatant provocation? Such stunts undermine Albanians’ insistence that they are Macedonians before they are Albanians.

Vaulting Zaev into power is not going to be enough to resolve a crisis whose roots date back at least to the 1990s, when Zaev’s own party embarked on a massive colonization of the state that Gruevski’s party countered through replication. The pendulum is just as likely to swing back again. The one critical difference is that, today, the stakes are much higher. Competing realities have cut through the very fabric of everyday Macedonians’ lives. Your professor and doctor and neighborhood traffic cops are appointees of the Gruevski regime; by night you march at Zaev’s rallies to have their bosses brought to justice. The country has become an exaggerated example of what’s now happening to electorates across the West: two voting blocs whose worldviews have become so fundamentally irreconcilable that they can no longer agree even on the basic terms of their differences.

In Macedonia, both sides insist that fascist elements have infiltrated the state. For Zaev’s supporters, these are the smoldering last cogs of the Gruevski regime. For Gruevksi’s supporters, these are the NGOs, who are conduits of foreign interests masquerading as arbiters of human rights. For years they have been funding opposition newspapers, emphatically assisting the non-Slavic minorities, cleaving fissures through the very societies they purport to be helping. If Soros has become the archetypal expression of this process, not just for Gruevski but reactionary regimes all across Eastern Europe today, it owes to the fact that he is at once the most shadowy and most recognizable figure associated with it. Like Viktor Orbán, Gjorge Ivanov, Gruevski’s puppet President, began his academic career with Soros funding.

More and more throughout the Greater Balkans, from Bosnia to Ukraine, “regime change” has become a byword for replacing one set of elites with another. Macedonia is the region’s next test case. Too often the response of the “international community” takes the form of damage control—dispatching a team of regional experts, withholding new rounds of funding—instead of addressing the deep-rooted defects within the state; as late as 2014, EU reports were deeming Macedonia’s democracy “efficiently administered.” If the United States and European Union can do anything for Skopje right now, it would be to broker the terms of Gruevski’s permanent sidelining in the least ham-fisted way they can manage. This probably means amnesty and exile, and not, as many Macedonians would prefer, a stiff jail sentence. He cannot be an embers-still-lit figurehead in a state whose judiciary, police and media he still overwhelmingly controls. Gruevski understands this. The April 27 attack, undoubtedly launched on his orders, shows how willing he is to outsource his strangle on power to the streets.