On 16 March 2025, a fire at the Pulse nightclub in Kochani killed 63 people in a single night, 57 of them students. The tragedy immediately became a national issue. People flooded the Who’s Next profile with a single message: organise a protest. The student movement declined to lead, fearing a repeat of the situation in Serbia, where mass student protests had been seen as destabilising the government. So Who’s Next stepped in.

We applied what we had learned in February. Every member showed their face publicly, we gave interviews to every available outlet and were explicit about who we were, where we stood and what we were asking for. The protest on 24 March, held after a week of national mourning, saw 20,000 people take part. It was the largest protest in living memory, and a deeply emotional one. The government’s response was to escalate its smears into a sustained campaign.

In the weeks that followed, we pulled back from the streets to regroup, to get to know one another, study the power dynamics we had just encountered and understand how a movement can be destroyed before it finds its footing if it loses control of its narrative. When someone else shapes the story, the smear becomes the story.

The protests were primarily political, though I see the two as inseparable. Economic hardship in North Macedonia is real and widespread, but it was not articulated in class terms. There was no framing of working people against capital, no organised labour dimension. What linked the protests to everyday economic life was safety. This means the inability to move freely through public space, run a business without being extorted, or trust that negligence and corruption will carry consequences. The system’s failure to protect Frosina and the 63 who died in Kochani was a political failure, with immediate, material consequences for people’s lives.

Trust in institutions is minimal across the board. Young people deeply distrust the government, the judiciary, the state administration and even established civil society organisations, partly because the ruling party has spent years portraying civil society as a foreign-funded threat to national sovereignty. Who’s Next was no exception: many young people were reluctant to trust a new movement, particularly after February’s smear campaigns. Gaining trust is not a single moment but an ongoing test, and we’ve had to prove ourselves again and again. Even the European Union (EU), long seen as the region’s aspirational horizon, commands less confidence among young Macedonians than it once did.

The marches looked like a spontaneous youth uprising, but behind them lay meticulous operational planning. We split the core team of 70 volunteers into 10 groups of seven, each with a coordinator responsible for a section of the route. Before every major protest, we rehearsed in a public park in Skopje, measuring the length of boulevards, working out how many people a street could hold and spacing the groups so chants would carry from the front of the march to the back. The goal was not just to fill the streets but to make people feel the collective energy of the crowd. We planned that emotional experience as carefully as the logistics.

A production team of freelance designers and videographers volunteered after we put out an open call. The entire campaign ran on about €200 (approx. US$230). We communicated only through Instagram, posting route maps and speech locations straight to our profile instead of sending press releases. Journalists simply copied what we posted. I am convinced that if the visuals had not looked professional, far fewer people would have turned out.

We also drew up strict protocols for handling provocations. We instructed coordinators never to touch anyone causing a disturbance, because a single act of force, however justified, would be used to paint us as violent. At the final rehearsal before one major march, plainclothes police officers already had the session in the park under surveillance, so we invited them to stay and watch and report back to their colleagues exactly what we were planning. They did.

The most immediate risk after the 24 March protest was not physical but reputational and professional. The day after the march, those who had given speeches or registered the event with police saw their names and faces on North Macedonia’s most-watched news programmes, presented as foreign agents trying to engineer a coup. Bot farms flooded our accounts. At the peak I was receiving roughly 1,000 threatening messages an hour, many of them aimed at my family. I deleted my profiles for a month. Several participants lost their jobs in the state administration. Others had parents in public institutions dismissed over their children’s involvement.

Throughout the protest period, plainclothes police kept watch outside the homes of core organisers. The constant monitoring, on the street, at the supermarket, in conversations with people who had seen the television coverage, created a psychological burden that was, in some ways, heavier than the threats themselves. Even relatives who had not taken part were affected, professionally and through the social pressure they faced in their communities.

None of the protests were violent, and no one was arrested. I put this down partly to careful preparation and partly to a deliberate choice to stay forceful but never destructive, and so deny the government any basis for the narrative it was trying to build. That discipline, held under sustained pressure, is one of the things I consider a genuine achievement of the protests.

The government met none of our formal demands. We called for an independent expert commission to oversee the Kochani investigation, the declassification of all government-held information on the fire, a special court for the case given the lack of confidence in the judiciary, mandatory independent safety inspections of all licensed nightclubs and compensation for the victims’ families, which the government refused. The government temporarily closed some venues, then stopped engaging with us altogether. Six months on, we were invited to address a parliamentary commission on Kochani. This was the closest thing to formal recognition we received.

The international picture was equally bleak. Our attempts to reach the EU delegation in North Macedonia to hold a meeting went unanswered. A contact who travelled to Brussels just after the fire found that the tragedy had not registered at all with EU officials. When the EU’s official progress report on North Macedonia came out, none of the anti-democratic measures of the protest period, such as the bot attacks, the dismissal of civil servants and the smear campaigns, appeared in it. The gap between what was happening on the ground and what outside institutions could see was huge.

Even so, I wouldn’t call the outcome a failure. The government was forced to mobilise its full apparatus, including bot farms, dismissals, state media and surveillance, against a group of 20 people who showed their faces and a few hundred who organised around them. That response is itself a form of testimony. A new generation of activists now exists where none existed before. Who’s Next has since moved into a support role, sharing logistics, equipment and know-how with smaller movements, including a campaign against air pollution in Skopje.

Our next phase is not another wave of street protest but the slower work of building a broad democratic coalition. It starts from a hard lesson. North Macedonia’s democratic deficit is structural, and no single cycle of mobilisation will resolve it. I believe in the saying that in any protest movement, those who gain the most are the organisers themselves, because confronting power transforms how we see the society we live in. That’s my most honest account of what 2025 gave us.