Bulgaria could try to abuse the situation with more than 80,000 Bulgarian passports owned by Macedonian citizens, says Macedonian Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani in an interview with German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
However, Osmani says that an even greater threat lies ahead if we do not become part of the EU because then citizens will be forced to apply for Bulgarian passports for social and economic reasons.
Asked whether there are guarantees that Bulgaria will not make further demands after the eventual adoption of the constitutional amendments, Osmani says that no one can know what the next day will bring, reports Deutsche Welle.
“Unfortunately, we have often been disappointed and the dynamics in Bulgarian politics is so insecure that no one knows what the next day will bring. I am rather certain that Bulgaria will continually to formulate new demands, but I believe the EU agenda is important, nothing else. We reached a compromise with Bulgaria, an action plan on minorities. We want to shift the discussion from historic interpretations and identity issues to human and minority rights, because this is what we are good at. North Macedonia has built a unique model of a functional multiethnic democracy, despite all the skeptics who believed this is not possible in the Balkans,” says Osmani.
