VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski expects that the European Union will focus its efforts in resolving the dispute with Bulgaria on the Bulgarian side. “If they focus on the Macedonian politicians, they will not succeed. We will not allow concessions in the Parliament and we will resist any changes to our textbooks. We can’t allow in the 21st century that history is be used as obstacle for our future. The EU needs to keep its word”, Mickoski said in an interview with Fokus.

The interview comes as European Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi and Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva are visiting Sofia and Skopje to see if they can get Bulgaria to lift its veto. Bulgaria demands major concessions from Macedonia on issues of national identity and history, and threatens to block Macedonia’s EU accession talks until it relents. This raised the prospect of Macedonia being left out of accession talks while Albania could be allowed to progress further.

I don’t expect that we are decoupled from Albania. There are EU member states that won’t allow it to happen. But look where we are now, three years ago we were critical of Zaev because we were lumped together with Albania. And now we are desperate to be kept in the same group with them. This is where the constant humiliations and the sell-out of everything we built over years brought us. Every other country is now trying to settle its own historic issues over the back of Macedonia, Mickoski said.

The opposition leader added that the current crisis is the result of Zaev’s and Nikola Dimitrov’s hasty push to make deals with neighboring countries without negotiating them properly.

We now see where their haste brought us. We are the laughing stock of Europe. Half of Europe is saying that we changed our name, our Constitution and we got nothing out of it. Zaev was undermining our negotiating positions. Three years ago, when he proposed the name Ilinden Macedonia to be used for all purposes, I asked him if he is aware that he is undermining our leverage built over decades. He insisted that it will get us into NATO and the EU. We haven’t begun accession talks yet. And we would have become a NATO member state regardless, if there was sufficient geo-strategic interest, Mickoski said.