1 “The Growth Plan is much more than an initiative,” said Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski at the Western Balkans Leaders’ Summit in Tirana, whatever that sentence’s supposed to mean. Especially when you consider how the plan is being fulfilled at home. Abroad, when he meets officials from the Brussels administration, he talks to them about reform steps, including reforms in the judiciary, but when he returns home, he goes right back to entertaining us with his guesstimates.

According to the Government’s Reform Agenda for 2024-2027, by June 2025, amendments to the laws regulating the salaries of prosecutors and judges, along with their institutions, should be adopted. By December 2025, the financial independence of the judiciary is supposed to be ensured. And it was precisely that Reform Agenda that the Government hailed as the best document in history, so good that we became the first in the Western Balkans group to receive money from the EU.

And Mickoski, instead of answering the question of why he’s behind in fulfilling the tasks he himself set and had approved and funded by the EU, is wasting our time with excuses along the lines of prosecutors and judges are to blame, they demand high salaries, let the citizens say whether they deserve the salaries they receive…

Let the citizens say what, exactly? Citizens should be asking how far the Government has come in meeting the obligations it undertook to secure the judiciary’s financial independence. That’s all there is to it.

The Ministry of Finance’s practice of approving recruitment in the judiciary threatens judicial independence. That’s what the Government wrote in its Reform Agenda. So, this whole line of talk “I won’t give them money because I’m worried about how they spend your money, then I’ll give them money but I’ll demand accountability…” is simply a way of buying time.

Does the Prime Minister want a reform that will ensure an independent, non-corrupt judiciary, because the money that’s currently allocated isn’t enough, as he himself wrote in the Reform Agenda,  or does he simply want to replace the existing judges and prosecutors and carry on the reform with judges and prosecutors from his notebook?

Since he apparently knows who deserves what salary, and whether they deserve it at all, why doesn’t he become both a prosecutor and judge himself?

Soon enough, he’ll be able to cut MPs’ salaries if they pass laws he doesn’t like.

He might even cut the president’s salary too, if she stops listening.

2 Bulgaria will carry on stealing our European future, and we’ll have to learn to live with it. Besides, the government under VMRO-DPMNE and VREDI promised to bring the EU back home, didn’t they? Well then, get on with it. In the Growth Plan, they wrote their own tasks in the Reform Agenda, the EU accepted them, and the EU will fund them. So, get down to work, deliver on your obligations. The elections are over, the New Year and Christmas holidays will be over soon too.

We’ve already elected mayors who boast about counting rubbish bins and cleaning fountains. They even boast about overseeing construction in kindergartens and checking hospital equipment.

Mickoski hasn’t been in opposition for a long time. He’s been the Prime Minister for quite a while now. It’s about time he started dealing with the issues he himself set out in the two election campaigns, both last year and this year.

3The government doesn’t even hide the fact it has no intention of unblocking the accession process without guarantees from the EU that Bulgaria will stop obstructing us by denying the Macedonian identity. The EU can’t give such guarantees. And that’s that.

Bulgaria has pushed us deep into a dead end on the road to the EU, and that’s simply a fact. The EU itself is already losing interest in us. They don’t even bother trying to understand what’s troubling us. I doubt they’re even listening anymore. Their politicians fly in, stay for a few hours and leave, and don’t even try to come up with fresh statements.

It never seems to sink in that Bulgaria doesn’t respect the Macedonian minority, ignores the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and doesn’t allow Macedonians to organise in their country.

Macedonians in Bulgaria are EU citizens. Macedonians in Greece are EU citizens. The descendants of refugee children from Greece born in Eastern European countries that are now part of the EU are EU citizens. And Macedonians in Macedonia who’ve declared themselves Bulgarian just to obtain Bulgarian passports are also EU citizens. Most of them live in the EU.

Only Macedonians who hold a Macedonian passport aren’t EU citizens. At this rate, they never will be.

VMRO-DPMNE can just keep entertaining us with the stories about Dubai, Zaev’s yacht, and SDSM’s reforms with Venko Filipche. That’s far less painful than asking the Government how far it’s come with the reforms that it itself pledged to deliver to the citizens, but still hasn’t.

And when they sing “unite Pirin, the blue Aegean, with the clear waters of the Vardar,” perhaps it will dawn on their voters that two parts of Macedonia are already in the EU. And that only the EU can make the dream of “making Macedonia from three parts whole again”.

It’d be nice if the Government showed at least some concern for those who’ve remained living along the “clear waters of the Vardar”. If it is at all interested in the European future of Macedonians who hold a Macedonian passport.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski