The influential Macedonian journalist Ivor Mickovski considers the PM’s promise that “we will once again have larger living standards than the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and Bulgarians, as we used to” as indolent and offensive.

“To publicly talk such rubbish means that you (PM Kovacevski) have skipped elementary education and you don’t understand what a historical context is, what is the proportion of territories, economies,  populations, in what manner and how much these countries are involved in the German economy, or why are they part of the American geopolitical avantgarde, you have no clue what a historical incident and a necessary buffer Yugoslavia was, that former Czechoslovakia before the WW2 was reacher than Switzerland, to be blind of the fact that Poland receives over €110 billion per year from EU for over a decade, that it will create the largest army in Europe.

In general, to compare Macedonia to those countries, even to Bulgaria, is extremely rude and ignorant.

We cannot compare with the European dwarfs, like Slovenia, Malta, or Cyprus, let alone with historically self-aware and economically developed countries”, the journalist and activist Mickovski wrote in his Facebook post.