At yesterday's meeting of European Union foreign affairs ministers, Bulgaria did not support the draft negotiation framework for North Macedonia, with which Sofia blocked the start of its western neighbor's EU accession negotiations.
The head of Bulgarian diplomacy, Ekaterina Zaharieva, said after the online meeting of the EU General Affairs Council that the proposed draft negotiation framework with North Macedonia does not meet Bulgaria's requirements.
"We can approve the negotiation framework with the Republic of Albania because we believe that it has fulfilled most of the conditions set in March. But Bulgaria cannot support the draft negotiations with North Macedonia at this stage," said Zaharijeva after the meeting. In March, the EU decided to open negotiations with Tirana and Skopje, but Bulgaria warned that it would prevent this due to disputes with Skopje over issues of ethnic identity, interpretation of history and the name of the language. After the meeting, German Foreign Minister Michael Roth, whose country holds the EU presidency, said that it is now up to Bulgaria and Macedonia to resolve the dispute before EU leaders allow negotiations to begin.
"We want to be helpful, we want to clear the way as much as possible, so that the intergovernmental conferences can begin," Roth said at an online press conference.
Bulgaria's blockade poses an additional hurdle for North Macedonia, which recently changed its name to please Greece and resolve a decade-long dispute that has hindered its progress toward EU membership.
After that, North Macedonia and Albania still had to wait until March this year to get the green light for negotiations on EU membership, since France expressed skepticism in 2019 about their performance in the field of democracy and the fight against corruption.
Bulgaria, which has long advocated the European integration of the Western Balkans, wants the negotiating framework to include guarantees that Skopje will meet the terms of the 2017 Friendship Agreement. That agreement deals mainly with historical topics, among which are the Bulgarian request to omit from the history textbooks in North Macedonia the pretensions to the Macedonian identity of some historical figures and not to mention that Bulgaria is guilty of the fascist occupation of North Macedonia during the Second World War. Sofia is also asking for guarantees that official EU documents avoid mentioning the "Macedonian language", which it claims is derived from Bulgarian.
"(Bulgaria's) demands go beyond the scope of the 2017 agreement, they affect identity issues, which is not acceptable for us," North Macedonian President Stevo Pendarovski told EUobserver, adding that the agreement was supposed to "separate historical from political issues" which "enables differences in history be the subject of academic discussion, not dialogue between countries". EUobserver states that some in Skopje believe that the Bulgarian veto is a populist trick by Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who is expected to hold elections in the spring.
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