Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski ruled out resigning and allowing early elections, even if it means that the constitutional changes requested by Bulgaria will be delayed in Parliament indefinitely.

Kovacevski held a press conference yesterday, after arranging a meeting of his coalition partners, in which he insisted that the United States strongly backs the amendments, and it is up to VMRO-DPMNE to provide the votes, without any concessions. VMRO insists that the current Parliament does not have mandate for such changes, and calls for early elections.

I’m not considering resigning. We are discussing our EU membership here. We have arguments to support EU membership and this process can’t be held hostage to the vote on the constitutional amendments. I hope that the opposition will join the pro-European bloc, Kovacevski said.

He insisted that US Secretary of State Blinken and his Balkan envoy Escobar declared that the EU integration is an irreversible process and that they were concerned over how the opposition is delaying the vote that would declare the Bulgarians as one of the constituent nations of Macedonia – even as Bulgaria refuses to recognize its own Macedonian minority and raises theories about the origin of the Macedonians which Kovacevski himself compared to the Russian treatment of the Ukrainians.