1 When, as a country, you allow the heat distribution in the capital to depend on a company whose owners no one knows, it’s no wonder that they’re laughing in the Government’s face by informing them that as a “socially responsible company” they’ll stop supplying heat the next day unless they receive money from the Budget. The company that’s now blackmailing the country with the collapse of the entire energy system, since 54,000 households, 95 educational institutions and 1,027 other facilities in Skopje depend on it, in 2012, when VMRO-DPMNE were in power, was registered under the name “Balkan Energy Group” (BEG), with the main activity – “consulting regarding the operation and other management”.

If tomorrow all those who are using the discrict heating in Skopje switch to electric heating, the energy system in the entire country will colapse.

And VMRO-DPMNE is gloating over their own offspring. They’re the ones who created BEG, and now they’re saying “Boo SDSM, see what BEG is doing to you”. I can imagine how happy they would be if during the voting for Dimitar Kovacevski’s new Government, the MPs sat with their coats on in the unheated Assembly.

These are lingering connections from the time of Nikola Gruevski’s fishy deals, which the SDSM Government failed to sever. For almost three years, the Prosecutor’s Office has been conducting prelimenary proceedings against members of the then Regulatory Commission, who issued licenses to BEG companies. There will be no investigation. And when we’re talking about dismantling the regime’s installations, it’s not just a simple political phrase. See, in reality it turns out that BEG is also part of the system that should have been dismantled.

VMRO-DPMNE resulted in terrible rule, and SDSM failed to change it. Everyone should be able to earn their daily bread. To be able to make some coin. Well, here’s the result of the bread and coin practices. A NATO member state has found itself in a situation where not only the political, but also the energy, and thus the economic stability, depends on a company with Russian businessmen on its supervisory board.

2 The prime minister-designate of the new government Dimitar Kovacevski announced that once he’s elected Prime Minister he’ll invite the leader of VMRO-DPMNE Hristijan Mickoski to a meeting. And Mickoski, although he hasn’t been invited yet, set a condition – he’d meet with Kovacevski only if they talk about early elections.

In a terrible energy crisis like this one, in the middle of a health crisis with record numbers of new Covid-19 cases and faced with the Bulgarian blackmail over lifting the veto to start the EU accession talks, it would be extremely frivolous for the new Prime Minister to waste his time with VMRO-DPMNE. We don’t have electricity, heating, the numbers of the sick are rising, the prices of fuel and food are soaring, and Kovacevski and Mickoski will sit in the Club of MPs and will go on and on about the Przino Government and the fingerprint voting machines. And the press-release service of the parties will keep on blaming – this one is someone’s pawn, and that one is someone’s knight.

Plus, Kovacevski can’t beat VMRO-DPMNE on their home ground. You can’t use political rudeness to beat the one who invented political rudeness. The first big trap that the new Prime Minister Kovacevski can fall into is to start bothering himself with Mickoski’s whims. There, VMRO-DPMNE won local government in most municipalities and in the city of Skopje. On top of that, they have “socially responsible companies” that need to repay them. Let the mayors and municipal councils demonstrate how good they are.

If he doesn’t want to meet you – that’s fine.

3 Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Nikola Dimitrov warned that insisting on a quick solution with Bulgaria could be detrimental to the national interests, and I wouldn’t reduce it only to the explanation that he’s offended that he won’t be part of the new government. In fact, what the current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is saying, that Dimitrov has been involved in the process so far and knows what is being negotiated with Bulgaria, is reason enough for caution. Because Dimitrov was in on it and knows what was being negotiated, we weren’t in on it, so we don’t know. And we fear what might have been agreed upon.

Besides, Dimitrov only expressed his impression out loud that insisting on closing the issue with Bulgaria at any cost  in order to start the EU accession talks could be harmful. I believe that a lot of people who aren’t in politics share the same impression. Because we don’t feel that we should justify ourselves to Bulgaria that we exist. And we feel that with such a blackmailing attitude demonstrated by Bulgaria, no agreement accepting our existence would be a guarantee that they’d stop blocking us. And what’s even more frustrating is that with this way of deciding things in the EU, that solution wouldn’t be a guarantee that we’d ever become a member of the EU.

4 We’re still fighting at home, and the Bulgarians came out again with the same blackmail to lift the veto. Right on time, before the announced visit of the new Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, who announced that he’d visit the new Macedonian Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski on 18 January to show “good will”.

What good will are we talking about if we consider that after the six-hour meeting of the Bulgarian Security Council where the state leadership and the leaders of the parliamentary parties discussed about Macedonia, President Rumen Radev said that discrimination against 120,000 Macedonian Bulgarians was escalating.

In the Bulgarian elections in November, 650 Bulgarian citizens voted at the polling stations in Macedonia. Radev is probably referring to the Macedonian citizens who have Bulgarian passports and who have moved abroad, in the EU countries. How is it possible for the Macedonian state to discriminate against the Macedonian Bulgarians in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain…? Or, perhaps, in Macedonia, we discriminate against them by electing them as MPs, ministers, and they hide because they want us to think that they are great Macedonian patriots. Our businessmen are also discriminated against. They too have dual citizenship so they can run their business in the EU. We discriminate against them by electing them as mayors with Bulgarian ID cards.

It’s pointless for Petkov to show good will symbolically. We’re tired of the EU’s symbolism and kind words. The best way to show good is for him to lift the veto so we could start the accession talks. Anything else would be just pretending to be cooperative in order to fool the United States and their European partners.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski