Prime Minister Zoran Zaev declared that one of the goals of his new Plan 21, or Action 21, will be to fight disinformation in the media. Zaev announced his plan in the aftermath of his failure to open EU accession talks, and the most talked about initiative is Zaev’s renewed push to legalize marijuana – a business his family has invested heavily in.

But the media disinformation campaign also provoked amusement in the public. Zaev said that there will be a “fight, together with the professional media and civil society organizations against disinformation, hate speech and hybrid attacks; protection of public interest through providing timely and accurate information and a joint fight with NATO against cyber attacks”.

Zaev insisted that the opposition is spreading false news and is facing retractions from Governments from EU member states. Zaev’s comment refers to the claim from the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party that other EU countries who are skeptical of enlargement joined Bulgaria in blocking Macedonia’s EU accession talks. Bulgarian media outlets reported that this included Holland and Denmark, and the two countries denied the report, which Zaev now attributes to VMRO.

But Macedonia was vetoed by other countries in the past, most notably Greece, but also France in 2019. Holland blocks Albania from opening EU accession talks, and other EU member states like Italy insist that Macedonia and Albania must remain in an enlargement, meaning that the veto on one country applies to both countries. And besides, a member state doesn’t have to officially veto a candidate country in order to influence the outcome of the European Council. Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva said that a number of countries express support to Bulgaria and are not too crazy about seeing Macedonia join.

And Zaev himself spent the past four years promising that the opening of EU accession talks is just around the corner. His most famous move in this regard was the “airplane selfie” where he took pictures with top Government officials coming back from the Council in 2018, declaring that the date to open accession talks has been firmly set for June 2019. The civil society organizations affiliated with Zaev’s SDSM party did not insist on punishing Zaev for his persistent spreading of fake news on this, and on a number of other issues, such as his frequent promises to resign, or his denials of involvement in the Racket scandal.

Instead, announcements of fighting fake news and hate speech have frequently been used by the Zaev regime to try and silence critics, including with police harassment of critical commentators for something they wrote on social media, attempts to exclude critical media from submitting questions to the Government – even on the coronavirus epidemic, and sentencing of journalists who published leaked reports.