1 It’s a familiar state. However, this time, we don’t refer to it as a national disaster simply because VMRO-DPMNE is in power. After winning the elections, they are constantly seeking ways to ease their responsibilities and avoid fulfilling the hardcore patriotic promises they made while in opposition. Their main task is to convince us that they’re actually fulfilling said promises precisely by not fulfilling them.

They had promised to abolish the position of First Deputy Prime Minister. That office was tailor-made for DUI’s Artan Grubi. In Hristijan Mickoski’s Government, the First Deputy Prime Minister is Izet Mexhiti from the VLEN coalition.

Prime Minister Mickoski explained it very clearly as follows: “According to the law currently in force, the Prime Minister has deputies, and the gentlemen’s agreement within the coalition is to appoint a First Deputy Prime Minister and it will be held by Izet Mexhiti. However, that’s contrary to the law because the law says the Prime Minister should have only deputies. Up to this point, things were done off-the-book and illegally, and that won’t be a practice in the work of this government.”

So, SDSM and DUI worked off-the-book and illegally, but now VMRO-DPMNE and VLEN claim they will work legally, but since they have a gentlemen’s agreement, they’ll continue to work as SDSM and DUI did – illegally.

I feel like the phrases “this Government will work legally” and “we have a gentlemen’s agreement not to work legally,” put together in the same sentence, seem to make sense only in the universe of loyal VMRO voters.

Despite the fact that the position of First Deputy Prime Minister isn’t explicitly illegal. It doesn’t exist in the law, but it exists in the Rules and Procedures of the Government. The law supersedes the Rules and Procedures. If the Rules and Procedures are illegal, just amend them. They’re one of the things that can be amended easily because the Government itself passes them. However, VMRO-DPMNE can’t amend them because VLEN won’t allow it. And just like that, Mickoski will acknowledge the gentlemen’s agreement that Zaev and Kovachevski from SDSM struck with Ali Ahmeti from DUI.

In fact, the essence of all this verbal gymnastics by the prime minister is: With a gentlemen’s agreement, we agreed to break the law.

2 Less than two days later, the party BESA issued a statement and provided a detailed explanation of how the gentlemen’s agreement would work in practice. First Deputy Prime Minister Izet Mexhiti had a meeting with the ministers of his coalition and announced that in the future, he will coordinate with them, the deputy ministers, and the directors appointed by the VLEN Coalition.

Everyone should know to whom the ministers and directors from the VLEN Coalition will report. With DUI, it was different. Ministers and directors from DUI reported only to Artan Grubi and Ali Ahmeti. They didn’t give a damn about Dimitar Kovachevski and Zoran Zaev. However, with VLEN being a coalition, it will be a bit more complicated. Izet Mexhiti will filter what reaches Hristijan Mickoski.

It’s not the same. Unlike Artan Grubi, this time VLEN’s ministers didn’t play futsal in Mexhiti’s office. But, let’s give them a chance. This is their first coordination. Maybe they’ll have a match or two.

3 Really, let’s give the new ministers a chance to show how capable they are. Their first opportunity to prove themselves is by being transparent and by telling us how many passports they hold.

The “360 Degrees” digital newsroom revealed that the Minister of Energy, Sanja Bozhinovska from VMRO-DPMNE, holds a Bulgarian passport. According to the publicly available records from the Commercial Court in Zagreb, she used it while serving as a director of a company in Croatia. She denies having Bulgarian citizenship, but didn’t answer whether she had had one before, because the digital newsroom discovered that she began the deregistration process at the end of last year before becoming a member of the high management within VMRO-DPMNE.

I sympathise with Minister Bozhinovska because she too had to humiliate herself to prove to the Bulgarian authorities that she is Bulgarian. But on the other hand, I’m personally not very happy to find out that the party presenting itself as the most Macedonian has appointed a minister from a country that has been conducting hostile actions against my country for years. Generally, I try to avoid people who are all talk and no action about hardcore patriotism, yet they give up at the first obstacle. Why don’t you just mind your own business? You got your Bulgarian passports, you managed to do it one way or another, but we don’t have to know, just shut up and carry on. Don’t judge the ones who’ve remained with only a Macedonian passport, and don’t keep tabs on how much we love our Macedonia.

And really, I don’t know what Bulgaria expects from us to life the EU veto, since we are obviously okay with having Bulgarians in the Government and Parliament.

Minister Bozhinovska had a firsthand experience and felt the hypocrisy and duplicity of the European Union when she was forced to abandon her Macedonian dignity in order to become a successful woman in the EU energy sector. Just like hundreds of thousands of Macedonians who, waiting for the EU to reform so that it could continue to expand, decided to move to the EU with Bulgarian passports. Some of them to survive, some to study, some to do business, some to travel, some to cover up crime, some to evade justice.

At least Minister Arben Fetai from VLEN had the decency to say he has Belgian citizenship and stated that declaring dual citizenship is ethical, and “when it comes to high state officials, it should be the norm.” You can immediately tell he comes from one of the more normal EU countries.

In general, it shouldn’t be a problem if politicians, MPs, ministers, directors of public enterprises hold passports other than Macedonian. Bulgarian, Serbian, Czech, Croatian, any nationality… However, it’s a problem when they hide that from us.

As taxpayers who provide for their salaries, we want to know if the ones we vote for work for our own benefit or have a spare motherland.

4 While VMRO-DPMNE was in opposition, it bothered them when the government said “our country,” trying to avoid saying “North Macedonia.” Now that VMRO-DPMNE is in power, after President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova and Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski drew the attention of the whole world by reigniting the Prespa Agreement, the term “our country” has become the patriotic norm for naming the country. Before that, no one, not even Greece, kept tabs on how many times the word Macedonia was said.

The Prime Minister took an oath in the name of “North Macedonia” because, as he stated, “it personally reminds me of the shame you inflicted upon me, my family and children, and the unborn grandchildren.” He also went to say that he would do anything in his power to correct the mistake, although unfortunately “I am now powerless because it is part of the Constitution and the laws.”

He handled it like a true gentleman… Out of the blue, he unearthed a previously resolved problem and resurrected it so it could backfire against us once more. It also gave Bulgaria an advantage and made it possible for them to reopen old wounds, despite their struggles to form a government over the last three years and six elections.

It’s a “Mile, I have an idea!” type of situation.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski