German State Minister Michael Roth – an outspoken supporter of the Zaev regime – is in Skopje today for meetings with Zoran Zaev and Nikola Dimitrov, during which he said that he fully supports the efforts of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Council to open accession talks with Macedonia and Albania. Roth is also visiting Tirana.

And while Zaev and Dimitrov learnt to manage expectations after their many failures, Roth kept the hopes up and insisted that there is still chance that the green light will be given in the late June meeting of the European Council.

I am grateful to our friends in the Government and in Bulgaria and thanks to them we now have a great opportunity to come to a solution that will be acceptable to all involved parties as early in June. The Portuguese Presidency is actively working to find such a solution and we in the Federal Government in Berlin are supportive where we can, Roth said.

He did not specify what has changed recently to give him this level of optimism. Dimitrov, in turn, literally used the phrase “managing expectations” and noted that there were high hopes in June 2018, then in June 2019, in October 2019 and finally in March 2020, but every time the hopes of opening accession talks were dashed.