1 Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski once again visited a supermarket to personally make sure that the Government’s decision to freeze the price of certain food products is put into practice. And on that occasion he wrote on Facebook: “We are dedicated to building a brighter future for all of us. We are creating a prosperous country and investing in our citizens and our businesses”. That’s right. You’re investing in your businesses.

He then went to Sitel TV and said that the country’s obligations to the EU shouldn’t be treated as a political hot topic. That’s right. It’s not time to politicize. It’s time to do business. For instance, we shouldn’t politicize the fact that a company which used to produce underwear was given a licence by the Government to supervise road construction at a time when the tender has already been announced and the fact it will be receive over 8 million euros from the state budget. As if that deal made with our money isn’t the result of a political decision. There’s no need for us to treat it as a political hot topic considering the prime minister’s wife and who knows how many relatives of other government officials have decided to set up electricity companies when the Government decides to subsidise electricity. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s purely a business decision. Everyone is allowed to set up a company.

The government can insist that “everything is according to the law” as much as they want, but in the end it’s us who goes to the polls. The ballot paper brings the punishment. Even if SDSM loses in the elections, who will they lose to? The tragedy is that even if there is a change, it will be for the worse. And the only ones to be held accountable for that will be SDSM, for missing a historic chance to make a better country for all of us, a country less dependent on the parties, with less corruption, with a more efficient administration, with no tolerance for impunity…  Of all the chances they’ve had since 2017, the only chance they took full advantage of was to make a new generation of loaded politicians.

2 And now they have nothing better to do than to mislead the public with news about an Albanian prime minister. Are we supposed to solve DUI’s riddle of “He’s coming”. I couldn’t care less who’s coming. The real riddle is: Who’ll take the biggest commission of the motorway deal?

There’ll be an Albanian prime minister. So what? Dimitar Kovachevski is Macedonian. Zaev is also Macedonian. Nikola Gruevski is also Macedonian. What benefits do Macedonians have from having a Macedonian prime minister that Albanians do not? The quality of life is equally bad for both Macedonians and Albanians.

Since they find it that important for the prime minister to be Albanian, I wonder what Albanians will get more than Macedonians and all the other citizens, both the ones included and the ones not included in the Preamble to the Constitution. The question doesn’t have to be hypothetical, let it be a real question, since we don’t know who’s coming. What did Albanians get more than everyone else by having Artan Grubi as a deputy prime minister? It’s undeniable what the party got. But what did Albanian citizens get? Is their life better now that they have an Albanian deputy prime minister in the government, and not an ordinary one, but a first deputy prime minister? Only DUI is better off as they can control tenders and bribe the electorate with jobs made possible by having access to public money. So they’d be able to do whatever they want – starting from the local level and all the way to the national level.

Just as VMRO-DPMNE had kidnapped the state during the time of Nikola Gruevski, DUI is kidnapping the interest of Macedonian Albanians. So much so that they consider it completely normal to have an equals sign between DUI and Albanians. So that when you’re talking about DUI, you’re actually thinking about Albanians.

It’s quite offensive when any party takes the right to exclusively represent the interests of a particular people or ethnic community.

3 Before the visit of Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, a document was leaked from a briefing with Macedonian citizens’ associations, according to which senior diplomats from the EU noted that “the high political and institutional corruption is becoming more evident”.

Good morning, Brussels. Everything you tell us is true. The fact there is corruption. The fact we need to strengthen the rule of law. The fact that despite the EU has poured several millions of euros into the county, the citizens’ support for the EU is declining.

It took you this long to notice that there is “high political and institutional corruption”? Well, a large part of the blame for that political and institutional corruption also goes to the EU leaders. This period reminds me of 2008, when Greece vetoed our integration into NATO and when Nikola Gruevski thought to himself: Whatever we do, we won’t join NATO until we change the name, so let’s get down to stealing and getting rich.

First, we lost a whole year listening to Merkel and Macron and all the other popular and forgotten European administrators saying we should change our name. We then lost two years while the EU was making up excuses about why they deceived us and why they didn’t fulfil the obligations they undertook after the Prespa Agreement – not this summit, perhaps the next one, then a new enlargement methodology, and then let’s wait for these elections to be over… Now we’re wasting a third year dealing with Bulgaria’s veto. We’re overcoming the obstacles that the European Union itself set for us the moment it got on the same wavelength with Bulgaria and accepted the discussion of whether we are Macedonians, when we became Macedonians and whether our language is Macedonian. Citizens’ support for the EU is declining because behind the EU’s face Macedonians see Rumen Radev, who tells them that they don’t exist.

European diplomats point to political corruption and impunity, but that corruption didn’t bother them when they had to secure a majority to change the Constitution by adding the suffix “North” in the name, so several MPs were pardoned for very serious crimes, and some were even rewarded. They demand an efficient judiciary and prosecution and investigations into high-profile corruption. Great. We demand the same. However, would the Prosecutor’s Office dare prosecute a politician for corruption when they’re expected to change the Constitution one of these days?

Before Borell’s visit, diplomats at the informal briefing advised the civil society organizations to let the public know that “fulfilling the necessary requirements and conditions is part of the negotiating framework with the European Commission, not with an EU member state”.

In other words – don’t be mad at Bulgaria, be mad at the entire European Union for blocking the country’s development for three years just because you are Macedonians who speak Macedonian.

Meanwhile, Macedonia is given a deadline until November to deliver the constitutional amendments in order to start the negotiations in practice. However the EU can’t give itself a deadline for how long the negotiations would last, so Eurobureaucrats told Macedonian journalists in Brussels that the Government in Skopje should be more realistic in setting the deadlines by which we’d join the EU.

In other words – put Bulgarians in your Constitution, and we’ll see if we’ll ever accept you in the EU.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski