1 I used to think that those who sit on a crate outside the local corner shop, drinking beer and chatting about how the European Union is about to collapse, were just talking nonsense to amuse themselves. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. It turns out they were very well informed. If the Minister of Finance, Gordana Dimitrieska-Kochoska, says that “in the next 10 to 15 years, dozens of large European countries will go bankrupt”, then perhaps it really is worth waiting for the European Union to collapse.

The Minister of Finance shared these insights with the public after returning from Washington, where our government received praise from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its budget consolidation. She also claims that our people, the emigrants, are returning because they see that things in the West aren’t looking too good. Meanwhile, back home, everything is splendid.

If we’re really waiting for dozens of large European countries to go bankrupt, why is Mickoski’s government, which includes the Minister of Finance, boasting about foreign investment? Are the companies investing in Macedonia coming from the very countries we’re expecting to collapse? Isn’t it a bit stupid to celebrate investment while knowing it’s bound to fail?

The Prime Minister says: “It is difficult to live in Germany, too, I am just returning from Austria, it is difficult to live in Austria, there, a litre of petrol and diesel costs over 2 euros.” What will the bankruptcy of large European countries mean for the emigrants who are returning in such large numbers that they cannot go unnoticed, so much so that even Prime Minister Mickoski met some of them on a flight from Frankfurt to Skopje around Christmas? They’re coming to take over the factories of the bosses they currently work for abroad. Once their economies start to go bankrupt, we’ll take over the factories of European companies for next to nothing. It means the VMRO-DPMNE and VREDI government is building a self-sufficient, autonomous system that can survive even the collapse of dozens of major European economies.

These 60,000 new, unsold and untaxed flats in Skopje, currently standing empty, will hardly be enough. When citizens of the European Union start to panic and, in a mad rush, seek salvation from poverty, these are the flats where the guest workers will settle. Our factories will be filled with a qualified workforce from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden… And the flats will finally have decent tenants, taught to behave according to EU standards. How lovely, Swedes and Danes for tenants. I hope we won’t quickly change their Scandinavian habits of communal living.

All right. Let the government believe we trust it. All right. Let them carry on with the propaganda. But even propaganda should make at least some sense.

2 That’s why countries of the European Union are now harassing us at the borders, treating us like citizens of some inferior race. They’re jealous of us. Because we’re better than them. Out of sheer malice and envy, they keep us waiting for hours at border crossings.

Setting VMRO-DPMNE propaganda aside, this new restriction introduced by the EU isn’t exactly helping to strengthen our pro-European orientation. The new Schengen system is designed to digitally register the entry and exit of travellers from third countries. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but we in the Balkans, who share land borders with the EU, and even the UK, which was part of the Union until recently, aren’t third-world countries. We’re not nations across oceans and seas on other continents, nor are we their enemies like Russia, nor a threat to them like China, nor so poor that people expect we are desperate to move there. There are Americans who may come to Rome, Paris or Athens for a honeymoon once in their lives. But we live just a few kilometres from EU borders, we live alongside our neighbours, we’re connected by friendship and business, and some even by family, and we take turns visiting each other on a daily basis. We with the Greeks, the Serbs with the Hungarians and Romanians, the Bosnians and Montenegrins with the Croats, the Albanians with the Greeks, the Italians…

Isn’t Europe incomplete without the Western Balkans? Or is that just something said for the cameras, when Ursula von der Leyen and Marta Koss make their statements? Is it really in the EU’s interest to unite all of Europe, or is it not that bad to leave “free” zones susceptible to influences from outside the EU. Let’s not forget, we’re talking about small countries, each with only a few million inhabitants. All six countries together, including our fellow citizens who’ve already emigrated across the EU, amount to around 16 million people. That’s only slightly more than the wider Paris metropolitan area, with its 13 million inhabitants. The geographical area over which the EU has been negotiating, postponing and inventing new conditions since 2003, since the adoption of the Thessaloniki Agenda for the Western Balkans at the Chalkidiki Summit, is demographically comparable to a large European metropolis.

Didn’t Angela Merkel launch the Berlin Process in 2014 precisely to gradually close this black hole on the European continent? Don’t they encourage regional cooperation, the exchange of people, ideas, young people, businessmen, students, scientists, artists…? They’re pouring a small fortune into it. They’ve set up countless joint chambers of commerce, prime ministers, foreign ministers, ambassadors are posing for photos together. There’s a business forum with Germany, there’s a forum with Austria, there’s a forum with Sweden, there’s an energy forum with Greece… Is there any logic in attending a forum in Trieste for two days, only to be told to arrive six hours earlier at the airport so they can harass you?

In 2009, they lifted our visa requirements. Now, however, they’ve introduced a new form of humiliation. A totally inhumane approach to neighbours caused by a Brussels bureaucracy that has lost touch with reality. Most likely conceived in the comfort of business lounges at European airports and in the stupidity that someone neatly named: “working from home”.

3 The fact that Greece decided to exempt United Kingdom citizens from the “entry-exit” system is probably because the British account for 20 per cent of all tourist income there. And they don’t use land border crossings, but arrive by plane. Of course, it’s also because there was someone to make it happen. It’s not just about the money.

Our citizens spend money in Greece as well. They’ve bought properties, opened businesses. But what diplomacy can achieve the same for us? What diplomacy will make it clear to the officials in EU countries that humiliating and harassing citizens of an EU candidate country further undermines the EU’s credibility, which has already been shaken by the tolerance of the Bulgarian veto on our EU accession?

Let’s not forget, we haven’t had an ambassador in Athens for more than a year. Probably because we have no unresolved issues with Greece and our relations are flourishing.

Who’d raise the matter in Athens before the summer exodus begins at the Bogorodica border crossing? Would they be more concerned than our own government about the harassment of our citizens at their crossings?

And perhaps someone from the World Bank tipped off the Minister of Finance that Greece is also among the European countries that will collapse. In that case, we might as well not waste our quality staff.

4 One of the qualities the state must never give up is the Deputy Prime Minister for Good Governance and Transparency, Arben Fetai of VREDI, who hasn’t been to work for over a month.

Prime Minister Mickoski said Fetai informed him that he didn’t see himself in the Government, but, “taking into account his education and experience within institutions in Brussels, I think it would be a good opportunity for him to serve as some kind of special envoy to the European Parliament, or the Brussels administration”.

So, as an ordinary employee, if you don’t show up for three days, you get fired. But if you happen to be a Deputy Prime Minister from a coalition partner, appointed to a made-up post to maintain the percentage of ethnic balance, not turning up for work turns you into a special envoy.

That’s what you call truly good governance in a government that even has a ministry and a Deputy Prime Minister for Good Governance. Another four and it’s “very good”. Being represented in Brussels through a “special envoy” will earn a five and the governance will be “excellent”. After all, Arben Fetai will have plenty to do there and will have to show up at work.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski