Bulgaria will continue to block North Macedonia's path to the EU
At a meeting of the National Security Council of Bulgaria, it was decided that the country will continue to block the European integration of North Macedonia and will allow negotiations on Albania's accession to the EU to begin.
This was reported by PlusInfo, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, after a meeting within the National Security Council, which was attended by the country's new Prime Minister Kirill Petkov and representatives of all parliamentary parties, stressed that Albania should not wait for North Macedonia and should be given the opportunity to begin negotiations on accession to the EU.
“Giving consent to start negotiations between North Macedonia and the EU should not be tied to deadlines, but to real steps [by Skopje], including the rights of Macedonian Bulgarians,” Radev said.
According to the Bulgarian president, four years after the signing of the Agreement of Friendship, Good Neighborhood and Cooperation between the two countries in 2017, North Macedonia has not done enough to implement it and is not providing guarantees for its implementation.
Let us recall that Bulgaria is blocking the process of North Macedonia’s accession to the EU, demanding that the concept of the Macedonian language be abandoned, considering it a dialect of Bulgarian, that such iconic heroes as one of the leaders of the anti-Turkish uprising Gotse Delchev be recognized as exclusively Bulgarian heroes, and many other concessions that will inevitably lead to the collapse of the national identity of the Macedonian Slavs. In particular, Sofia demands guarantees of rights for the Bulgarian diaspora in North Macedonia, without recognizing the existence of a Macedonian diaspora in Bulgaria, as well as a separate Macedonian nation.
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