Gunther Fehlinger, a very very online Austrian who runs a consulting business in the Balkans, has urged Macedonia to give up on commemorating holidays that annoy Bulgaria, mainly October 11th, when in 1941 Macedonian partisans began their guerrilla campaign against Bulgarian forces, and, for some reason, October 23, when the VMRO organization was founded in 1893.

Dear President, please downgrade VMRO day and YU Partisan Day per Presidential decree they shall not longer be State Public Holidays and do it now on Monday! Yes it will hurt Zoran Zaev and Hristijan Mickoski, but it will be enough for EU Membership talks to start now and only this matters! Why should a EU Member State celebrate Socialist Partisans who established a Socialist Dictatorship leading to 46 years of suppression? Yugoslavia was a terror regime same all Socialist Authoritarian regimes… why keep such public holiday to honor Yugoslavia?, Fehlinger said in a series of tweets aimed at President Pendarovski, which were republished by the Nova Makedonija daily.

Fehlinger proposes that Macedonia instead celebrates the days when the Prespa treaty and the 2017 Zaev – Borisov treaty were signed. It’s not certain to what extent is Fehlinger serious or just Twitter trolling, but thanks to Zaev, Macedonia is definitely in the midst of a process of rewriting its history and accommodating it to the histories of Bulgaria and Greece. One of the more recent Bulgarian demands is that Macedonia downplays its partisan struggle against Bulgarian forces during the war.