English
Constitutional amendments in the form currently being requested will not happen, said Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski in an interview this evening.
We are ready to talk. I am ready to talk to everyone, everywhere. For as long as it takes to find a solution that will be sustainable and that will take us to the ultimate goal. And in the meantime, we will deliver on the reform agenda, we will create a better society, better living conditions, and so on, Mickoski said in the interview with Nazim Rashidi.
The Prime Minister also added that in this entire process, the issues should be viewed in terms of principles, and principles should apply to everyone because there is no playing with them.
You must view things in terms of principles. There is no playing with principles. You said what the Macedonian Government agreed with Brussels, but I will not go into which Government agreed and I will not go into what our position was then and how all of this was agreed. The public knows it, has heard it. And we are aware of what that previous government agreed to, but also in Bulgaria a previous government agreed to something called respect for human rights. Now we are required by the principle, we are inside, you are outside and you want to come in, to accept what has been agreed, and on the other hand what a Bulgarian government has accepted, in this case respect for human rights, it is clear that we have a dozen judgments from Strasbourg, from the Court of Human Rights for the Macedonian community in Bulgaria, to respect its human rights, to allow the registration of clubs and organizations, etc., that it should not be respected, and we should respect it. That is called bullying and it has nothing to do with the Copenhagen criteria, nor with the values of the EU defined by Schuman, Degasperi and Adenauer. That is, we are inside, you are outside and if you want to be inside you will accept that or you will not be inside. This is bullying and this is unprincipled politics. This is a politics of double standards. Forgive me, but I am not a fan of this type of politics, Mickoski emphasized.
This is not a buffet, to pick and choose what so this suits me, that does not suit me, I will take this, I will leave that. No, these are principles. The more you play with principles, the more you weigh as a person. If you compromise with principles when it suits you, then you lose your specific weight as a person – the Prime Minister pointed out.
He emphasized that the goal of this Government is for Macedonia to be part of the EU, and not to achieve some temporary solution that would result like all the previous concessions that promised that we would be part of the EU, but unfortunately we are in the same place we were before the change of the constitutional name.
That is exactly the goal of this Government, to be part of the EU, and not just to start the process of becoming a member. When we know and when we have a solution on the table that will take us to be part of the EU, then we are ready to talk. We are not ready to talk about instant temporary solutions that start this process because we deserved it 25 years ago. And we deserved to start that process a long time ago. I am a witness when they told me to just change the name and immediately after that you become part of NATO, you start the negotiations and because you are the best in the club in 4-5 years you become a member of the EU. Those 4-5 years passed 3 years ago, and we are still in the same place where we were before we changed the constitutional name, and I will not say that we also changed the flag, we changed banknotes, the Constitution several times. And it was always the same rhetoric, the window is open, now the momentum is there, just do this one more thing and it is done. As you can see, experience teaches us the hard way. I am just trying, as the first person in the Government, to see things a little more clearly, said Mickoski.