How many years has the Macedonian language been around and why shouldn’t Zaev pretend to be Borissov’s friend?

Bulgaria will block Skopje’s path to the European Union and North Macedonia’s negotiating framework will not be approved at the General Affairs Council meeting on Tuesday.

However, there is still the possibility that the process will start within the rotating EU presidency in Germany, which expires at the end of the year.

For that to happen, Macedonian rulers must comply with Bulgarian requirements and sign a new document with Sofia to complete the work of the arid 2017 Good Neighbor Treaty, diplomatic sources said.

However, the ruling party in Skopje has come under increasing pressure from the VMRO-DPMNE opposition, which works against any compromise. The behavior of the Bulgarian IMRO is similar. The people of Karakachanov are preparing to use the “Macedonian” card in the election campaign and will not give it up easily.

A day ago, Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev commented that blocking the talks could trigger the development of undesirable events in both countries and said that the first intergovernmental conference with the EU could be convened at the end of December.

After inconsistent government policies for the past three years, Bulgaria now finds itself in the delicate and uncomfortable position of being the only country blocking Skopje. An indisputable decision against the national interests of Bulgaria.

Bulgaria insists that good neighborly relations be a criterion for North Macedonia’s membership of the European Union, that the official constitutional name of the Republic of North Macedonia be used instead of the abbreviation North Macedonia, and that the wording of the language is the “official language” of the candidate country and not “Macedonian”. language. “These Bulgarian reservations are not reflected in the draft negotiating framework, although Sofia has clearly expressed her position to other member states. For now, Skopje refuses to make concessions.

Karakachanov: No information from Skopje

Deputy Prime Minister Krassimir Karakachanov told BNR on Monday that “there has been no information from Skopje since Thursday last week.” He confirmed that there is no review of the Bulgarian position.

Karakachanov described comments that Bulgaria was working for Russia by stopping Skopje for the EU as “nonsense on wheels.”

“What Russian post do we serve? Did the ideology develop in Moscow? Skopje applies the policy of the Russian Comintern ” Karakachanov said.

“The hate speech that we see in the media every day continues.”

VMRO-DPMNE steps up attack on Zaev

The Vecher newspaper, close to the pro-Russian VMRO-DPMNE, writes that Zaev and Chancellor Buyar Osmani have opened Pandora’s box with the adoption of negotiations on the national identity and national language of Macedonians.

The mere adoption of negotiations on these issues opens a greater relativization of the facts.

Both on the Bulgarian side, as in some European countries, and in Minister Osmani, we hear the phrase that “a treaty requires a commitment from both parties”, which in any case is a defeat for the Macedonian nation and language, which no one has argued ever since. the founding of the modern Macedonian state, writes the newspaper.

Vecher notes, quoted by BTA, that the Macedonian government and Minister Osmani are gathering data and advice to draft their position from former SDSM minister Denko Maleski, whose view is that Macedonians have Bulgarian roots.

“Maleski could be an advisor to the Bulgarian side, which has the same positions as his, but not to the Macedonian side, which, after making the mistake of opening the issue and starting negotiations on it, is now trying” to find a compromise generally acceptable. “

Maleski has no dilemma that Macedonians are Bulgarians, he wrote in an article in April this year. In it, it says that Macedonians and Bulgarians were part of a single people, that in the SSR and Macedonian authorities selected the historical data and wrote Macedonians where Bulgarians were written.

“The Macedonian language has existed for several hundred years”

The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANI), for its part, has expressed its support for the integration of the Republic of North Macedonia into the EU, while respecting the identity of the Macedonian people, the newspapers Nova Makedonija and Vecer write today .

The Macedonian language and its dialect forms have both a spatial continuity (Macedonian dialects also exist outside the borders of present-day Macedonia) and a temporal continuity (the Macedonian language has existed for several hundred years)., it is said, among other things, in the document, the text of which the newspapers publish in full.

“Free Press”: Zaev Shouldn’t Pretend to Be Borissov’s Friend

Sloboden Pechat published a comment on the subject by Ljubisa Nikolovski, which was translated without editorial intervention by the FOCUS news agency. Bulgaria has repeatedly called for an end to hate speech in the Macedonian media.

“Politicians can be restricted in public, but the public should not be restricted by the fact that Macedonia, obviously due to opposition from Bulgaria, will not receive a date for negotiations and will not become a member of the EU. And we must come to terms with this possible “We will remain Macedonians, we will speak Macedonian, Gotse will remain ours, but we will not befriend the Bulgarians. There’s no need to pretend to be nice when obviously (the Bulgarians) knew from the beginning what they were preparing for us, “he wrote in the comment.

Therefore, neither Neither Zaev nor Dimitrov should pretend to be great friends with Boyko Borisov and Zaharieva, because they will probably leave the Bulgarian political scene anyway.

But the consequences will remain. So Macedonia is now paying for the mistakes of the EU enlargement in 2007, when it incorporated Bulgaria into its company. But the consequences will be borne by the Union itself, which is apparently in a certain sense becoming a “captive state” of its own principles and the whims of Bulgaria, which abuses these principles.

The EU now looks like a fragile old woman who can only silently see herself as one of its mischievous members and undermine the principles that have built it for decades. Who will then believe in the Union which is at the heart of the European values ​​from which it is guided and requires them as a condition of all who want to join it?

But apparently instead of the fundamental Angela Merkel or the rebel Sarkozy, now the Bulgarian Ekaterina Zaharieva gives lessons according to European criteria. With the veto on Macedonia, Bulgaria puts the Union in a servile role, because before that, almost unanimously, they all agreed to give a “pass” to Macedonia in December.

Zaharieva, and not only her, Europeanized her personal (Bulgarian) disappointments, putting them in the lap of all those who “pulled” this very Bulgaria from the time when the most inherent criteria in this country were “three reds”, which probably Zaharieva remembers well. If you forget again, you will be reminded of a significant number of Macedonians whose last names end in “ov” but who are not Bulgarians.

In other words, the criterion of “good neighborly relations” during the admission of new members to the Union based on “a condition without which it is impossible” became “an ultimatum with which it is possible.” But only one way. Because this criterion is an instrument that can only be used by the Member States and not by the candidate countries for accession to the Union.

And countries like Bulgaria can abuse this phrase to the point of denying the entire nation as a condition for membership in the Union. If the EU takes into account such a distortion of the criteria that it has set, then its principles of democracy and freedom of self-determination will be counted in adjecto. So either the whole Union is lying or someone in it is lying.

But perhaps Bulgaria’s behavior is the reason why the EU regrets that it continued with enlargement in 2007, so to stop it, it began to devise and apply increasingly difficult accession criteria and finally, with the French proposal, reconsidering the whole process becomes de facto impossible.

From now on, the Europeans stay with Bulgaria, in which they want a “Sarkozy circle”, but cancel the Berlin process, because from tomorrow it will not cost even five dollars.

And the Balkans! The Balkans have their disadvantages, but also their advantages. We are not the gate and the guardian of Europe!, Concludes the comment.