Macedonia wants to be part of the European Union and on that path we made many concessions, which according to bureaucrats from Brussels and around the world, should have been the last thing we did, but, unfortunately, they betrayed us and lied to us, Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said in an interview with Breitbart News.
PM Mickoski described EU membership as the second key goal, after the strategic partnership with the United States.
“To be a part of the EU is good for plenty of reasons for my country and for the citizens of my country. Why? Because we are talking about increasing the security and increasing the resilience of the region overall,” Mickoski said.
“We started our journey two and a half decades ago. It was 2000 when we signed a stabilization and association agreement with the European Union. Then, together with Croatia in 2005, we’ve become officially candidate countries to be a part of the EU. In 2008, from the European Commission, we’ve got the first positive report for starting the negotiations but unfortunately since then our hurdles and our challenges started. So practically, it was first the name dispute with our south neighbor Greece, and now we have a dispute with our eastern neighbor Bulgaria, and all those disputes are somehow connected with our identity. I don’t know whether you knew that information, but we are facing a lot of challenges since we’ve become an independent state from the former Yugoslavia,” said the PM.
“If we go back three and a half decades ago, I must flag out a couple of very important pieces of information. We changed our flag. We changed our currency. In the meantime, we changed our constitution two times, and finally we changed our constitutional name. According to a lot of, I would say, bureaucrats from Brussels and from all over the world, it’s supposed to be the last thing that we did. But unfortunately they betrayed us and they lied to us. Immediately after our change of our constitution, French President Macron imposed a veto. He requested a change of methodology of negotiations, and when the new methodology for negotiations was adjusted, then unfortunately our eastern neighbor came to the scene and they asked from us to change our constitution. So practically, we are now in a very, I would say, critical situation, and very funny situation. In one multilateral organization, we are allies with Bulgaria, with our eastern neighbor. I’m talking about NATO. And in another multilateral organization, European Union, we have the same allies from NATO imposing constraints for us and imposing a veto, which is not a very, I would say, friendly gesture. Those are the double standards and unanimity rule within the EU itself. They can’t understand that our membership in the EU is strategical for NATO. As I said, from plenty of reasons, among them is resilience and security. So they are weakening the south and eastern flank of NATO by constraining us to become a part of the EU, because as economically much more stronger is my country that makes much more resilient the eastern flank of NATO—and we will be able to modernize in a much quicker way our armed forces and invest more into the corridors which are important for logistical purposes of NATO. So there are plenty of reasons why we need to be a part of the EU, and this is the reason plus for the United States and President Trump’s administration to support us in this manner,” PM Mickoski noted in the interview.
