English
Macedonian Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said that his Government won’t act immaturely after the move of the European Parliament to delete mentions of the Macedonian national identity and language from its latest progress report.
Maybe some were expecting that after the vote we will angrily abandon the negotiations but we won’t act immaturely and irresponsibly. On the contrary, we will continue to work even harder and with more dedication and we will prove that we are the best student in the class by conducting reforms at home. They will not be able to obstruct our path to the EU, Mickoski said.
The Prime Minister strongly condemned the outcome in the European Parliament, done under pressure from Bulgaria.
This was a precedent, what one EU member state is trying to do, and it will affect the image of the European Union. The attempt is to completely rename the Macedonian identity and language, that some members of the European Parliament tried to declare as “modern”. This failed because the majority of the representatives saw through the idea, but they succeeded to delete the Macedonian language and identity from the report, after it was adopted at the AFET foreign affairs committee. It is much more important to note that Europe, the world and the Macedonian citizens saw how the 2022 acceptance of the proposal is not just some light change and intervention in the preamble to add the Bulgarian minority in it. It is a much more fundamental problem. It is a denial of the identity and language of one of the smallest nations in Europe by Bulgaria. That is anything but a European value, the Prime Minister said, while expressing gratitude to the 120 members of the European Parliament who did not vote for the proposal and the 100 more who abstained from the vote.
