1 One way or another, the EU will decide to accept Montenegro as its 28th member. Which is good news for us. We’ll have one more friend in the EU who, I hope, won’t find any flaws with us that require us to change our Constitution again.

Unlike Montenegro, we’ll approach the EU gradually and cautiously. Because if we were to join them abruptly, we might disrupt their common market with our rapid pace of development. We’re fifth in Europe. And, “this is not what the Government says, it is not what Hristijan or the parties say, but what Eurostat says,” said Prime Minister Mickoski.

Well now, we can’t possibly slow down economic development just because of the European Union.

2 Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said that the solution to start EU accession talks is very simple. Bulgarians should be included in the Constitution. Nothing new.

The President of the European Council, António Costa, said the same thing: “What was agreed in 2022 should be delivered, and nothing more.”

It’s simple, but not quite that simple. The Macedonian government is seeking guarantees that, once Bulgarians are included in the Constitution, Bulgaria won’t abuse its EU membership to impose additional demands related to the denial of the identity of the Macedonian people, demands that have been certified as official policy in documents adopted by their parliament.

But no one in the EU is willing to provide such guarantees. That, too, is nothing new.

Perhaps it would be simple to include Bulgarians in the Constitution if Bulgaria allowed the registration of at least one association of Macedonians in their country. In that case, perhaps Mickoski might find it easy to convince his electorate that Bulgarians should be included in our Constitution. After all, VMRO loyalists always listen to their leader.

However, someone needs to work that out with the other 26 member states. Especially now that, within the EU itself, people have been more vocal about bilateral disputes being abused in the accession process for new members. We are the frustrated party. We are the ones who’ve been hurt by the European Union repeatedly inventing new obstacles over the past twenty years to explain why it can’t begin accession negotiations with us. We are the ones with a problem. We are the ones who need to offer solutions. Try this, try that… One thing’s certain, we won’t convince Bulgaria to help us in the process. At the moment, however, I have the feeling we’re simply sitting and waiting for the European Union to get fed up and one day decide to let us in. Or we could simply give up – but no government is ever going to say that openly.

3 I hear Prime Minister Mickoski explaining that Radev spent an entire year, convincing European leaders that Bulgarians should be included in the Macedonian Constitution. And what was Mickoski doing during that time while in opposition? While Radev was focused on blocking Macedonia’s path to the EU, VMRO-DPMNE was focused on blocking the SDSM government. Not only did they block it, they also sowed hatred with talk of “northerners”, “you’re this, you’re that”, “I won’t open my door during the census” and similar abominations. And what is he doing now that he is in power? The same thing. He’s still fighting with SDSM on a daily basis and still sowing hatred with “rodents”, “dregs of society”, “molluscs” and most recently, – “below-average political mediocrity”.

As if the people in VMRO-DPMNE were some kind of super-duper above-average hard tissue. Give me a break!

Don’t even get me started on SDSM, it’s as if they’ve decided to commit political suicide. They have a hundred issues they could be talking about, yet they remain obsessed with the inclusion of Bulgarians in the Constitution. They keep reminding us of that unfortunate “French proposal” that Bujar Osmani and Dimitar Kovachevski walked straight into. As if someone had handed them a manual for self-destruction.

Let VMRO-DPMNE bring us into the EU, as it promised during the election campaign. We’ll all be better off.

Not like this, where we haven’t moved an inch on the path to the EU for two years, where there are no actions, and we keep hearing even more horrible words. Since neither the government nor the opposition has anything of substance to say, all we hear every day are the awful things they say about one another. Political discourse that breeds even greater distrust in institutions.

How does either side think it will secure a two-thirds majority in Parliament if, one day, a solution to the issue of changing the Constitution presents itself? With this kind of rhetoric – not a chance.

The President of the country is busy posing for photographs at some cultural diplomacy events. There have also been announcements about sports diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy and sports diplomacy both sound wonderful, but we don’t even have diplomatic relations between the parties in Parliament. What we need is diplomacy between the leaders to define the state’s common interest. Not their parties’ interests.

Let them try to practise diplomacy on their own turf first. Let them meet, even if it’s behind closed doors. Because while Radev was travelling through Europe convincing European leaders that they should force us to amend our Constitution yet again, MPs in the Bulgarian Parliament, regardless of how fiercely they fought on television, unanimously adopted every resolution and declaration aimed at blocking our European future.

4 And then there’s Radev with his “brothers from North Macedonia”, and the entire Bulgarian politics… Brothers, you say? Yet you’re driving us further and further apart.

With the veto he has imposed on our path to the EU, Bulgaria is already creating a fourth generation of enemies. Let’s say our grandparents had a reason to remember their “brothers” in a bad light because many fought as partisans against the Bulgarian army, which was a fascist occupier until 1944. Let’s say our mothers and fathers also remember the wrongdoings of the fascist regime. Let’s say that my generation was influenced by Tito, as Bulgarian politicians like to claim, and that we were taught at school not to like Bulgarians – which is nonsense, but let’s grant them that for the sake of argument. But our children know nothing about Tito or the partisans, nor do they particularly care. What they do know is that, unlike their peers in neighbouring countries, they can’t study for free in the EU, they can’t travel freely in the EU, and it will be more difficult for them to advance in their careers and lives.

So you, Bulgarians, are deliberately stealing the European future from this new generation of Macedonians.

Finally, at the heart of every decision adopted by the Bulgarian Parliament lies the claim that we are one people living in two states. Then how, for the love of God, do you expect to achieve that through such intolerance? Or is this what happens when you find someone smaller and easier to push around… Brothers? Funny way of showing it. Do you really think that buying a Bulgarian passport automatically comes with “brotherly” love?

5 A bus carrying high school students from the Orce Nikolov High School in Skopje broke down during a school trip. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. Our own cars break down too.

The bus broke down four times during the trip. The parents called the police, who stopped the bus and sent it for a technical inspection. They did their job.

The Veles Police Department, which stopped the bus, announced that it had been determined that it had problems with the brakes. Meanwhile, the City of Skopje, which oversees the high schools in the capital, is lecturing us on journalism and says that “when publishing such or similar texts, in accordance with journalistic ethics, the other side should be consulted.”

So who exactly is the other side? Are we supposed to check the Ministry of Internal Affairs as well? And who else should we check with? The Prime Minister, Parliament?

At a time when the government is already urging us to check what kind of flats we buy, which doctors to see, which nightclubs to visit, are we now expected to keep a technical inspection station at home as well?

My children graduated from Orce Nikolov, and I can hardly recognise the school’s reaction, which has been trying to downplay the case from the very beginning. It even went so far as to threaten the students that there would be no more school trips. When my children studied there, this was a school that stood by its students.

How has a travel agency become more important to the school than its students?

How can you defend the indefensible? With arrogance, and nothing else. As if that arrogance, which masks irresponsibility, hasn’t already cost us dearly in Kochani, with Durmo Turs and Laskarci, with Besa Trans in Bulgaria… God forbid.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski