1 The Registry Office apologised to the mayor of Karposh municipality, Stevcho Jakimovski, for issuing a death certificate to his son and daughter-in-law instead of a marriage certificate. They even mentioned that they would punish the clerk who made the mistake.

For years, we’ve been writing about ineptness, incompetence and irresponsibility in the Registry Office. The State Audit Office counted over 20,000 inaccurate certificates in 2022, and that’s just in one year. Who knows how many inaccurate certificates have been issued so far. And who knows how many thousands of citizens have had to pay for new certificates, to pay for the incompetence and sluggishness of all those who got the certificates wrong? That’s 20,000 different destinies. And certainly, among those 20,000 people, there are cases that are more tragic, more devastating, and sadder than the shock experienced by Stevcho Jakimovski’s son and daughter-in-law.

But there you have it, what it took for the institution to admit its mistake was for the mayor of the municipality and a presidential candidate to be personally convinced of the incompetence and negligence of the employees, all because of how comfortable they feel with their state salary. When they get one of our certificates wrong, they don’t punish anyone. We’re the ones who are punished. We have to pay a second time. When they shock us with how illiterate and rude they are and complicate our lives, they don’t apologise to us. Stevcho is working on his presidential campaign, so they apologised to him. They don’t need to apologise to us. We’re just here to vote. And if we don’t vote according to their expectations – we’re considered stupid.

2 Just as we’ve been writing extensively about the mistakes in the certificates from the Registry Office and about leeches appointed by the parties in general, because they’ve been over hired even though they’re both illiterate and irresponsible, we’ve also been writing extensively about the chaos with access and parking at the Clinical Centre in Skopje.

Perhaps one of our politicians, who are acting like a broken record going on and on about the EU, Copenhagen criteria, including Bulgarians in our Constitution and similar Euro-Atlantic challenges, should try to enter the Clinical Centre one day like an ordinary citizen. Maybe when they themselves see how likely it is for someone to die on the street, in a very literal sense, on the threshold of the hospital because of the chaos that no one takes care of, they’ll also speak out and complain publicly like Stevcho Jakimovski did. Speaking of him, let him consider the example of the Clinical Centre and imagine how his municipality will look like and how people will access the Military Hospital and the Emergency Ward for the entire Skopje when the 17-story building pops up, the same building he’s hell-bent on pleasing the constructors, the so-called investors.

It’s important to please constructors, businessmen, party donors, because they’re first class citizens. The rest of us are here just to vote – there’s no need to please us. If that’s the case for them, it can be the case for everyone. That’s why you see people unloading beer at any time of the day, people leaving their cars in the emergency lane although it has to be free only for the Emergency Centre, people stopping “just for five minutes” to buy pretzels, people parking on the path for patients in wheelchairs because someone has broken the bollards, people blowing their horns in the hospital complex, but you won’t see the ambulance arriving on time.

The traffic mess is one problem. But it’s an even bigger problem that we don’t know who should bring order to it. Is it the Ministry of Health, is it the City of Skopje, have they extended the contract with “City Parking,” how many cars enter, how much money they earn… Those are our parking lots, our streets, our money, and our lives are at stake. We’re not talking only about Skopje, so it’s not like we can say who cares if citizens of Skopje die, because patients from the entire country are treated there. No one wants to go to the hospital, but eventually, life will take you there at some point.

Elections are coming, people will die. All those who need an ambulance, sorry. Don’t die yet. First, you need to vote.

May the parties enjoy the elections. They fulfilled all the promises they had made. They made promises to the party donors. They kept those promises. In that case, let the party donors vote for them.

3 Where do they get all these wild ideas? Now the government is scaring us by saying that around 2030, some countries may become new EU member states, and that we would just be in the audience applauding them.

Are we, the citizens, to blame for that? Did we come up with the French Proposal? They boasted that that they had refined it.

They have the audacity to boast that “Brussels supports our entry into the EU.”

Is that an optimistic message? Perhaps that message meant something 30 years ago when we became an independent state, perhaps it meant something in 2001 when we signed the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, perhaps it meant something in 2005 when we became a candidate for the EU. We celebrated on the Square, in the snow, soaking wet. But now, when we’re at the end of the road, with the screening process completed and before the start of the real negotiations, which we will not start, the only support the EU can give us is to include Bulgarians in our Constitution.

You call that support?

The first mistake the government made was even entering into a discussion with the EU on absurd issues of whether we exist or not, then it was incapable of securing a better solution, and now they’ve failed to implement the last thing, with the change of our Constitution without any guarantees that Bulgaria won’t endlessly impose new vetoes. I’m still angry about the French Proposal, although it’s not that severe anymore. What hurts more is that we’re hostages to the government’s incompetence to implement the bad proposal they boasted was excellent. The one we were going to “take with open arms.” The one “as sweet as Turkish delight.” And now they’re blaming us. As if they didn’t know who they were dealing with when they accepted that proposal. They thought – let’s please Macron now, and we’ll figure things out tomorrow. And voilà, tomorrow has come. Back home, they didn’t even try to consult with VMRO-DPMNE, and they labelled as anti-Europeans all those who were telling them they were making a mistake. Whenever we expressed our anger, they’d say: “It will be great.” They thought America would solve this problem for us as well.

4 It’s a pity that the American senior diplomat Gabriel Escobar, in charge of the Western Balkans, didn’t come to Skopje this time. He went to Pristina, Podgorica and Vienna, but allegedly, he didn’t want to interfere in our elections.

It would have been nice if he came. Not so he’d tell us for the hundredth time that “Washington expects a Government committed to the NATO membership and the EU integration.” We already know what. The EU is already a closed issue – we all want to join the EU, and there’s nothing to discuss on that topic anymore.

But then again, since he visited Albin Kurti in Kosovo and was very disappointed, maybe it would have been a good idea to stop by in Skopje and ask Bujar Osmani and Arben Taravari in which country they are running for president. Maybe they could have given him a little tour to Ohrid, with all the risks and all the stress on the way, to ask how the Law on Flags is implemented in practice here.

These are perfectly legitimate questions that could be posed to friends who brag about being Kale’s darlings[1] and have photos taken with the American flag. But he’s the one who should ask those questions. Not us. Because if we ask them, they’ll say we’re Albanophobes. That’s why, we’re not asking them. Let him ask them.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski

[1] Translator’s Note: The US Embassy in Macedonia is situated in the Kale neighborhood.