The VMRO-DPMNE leader, Hristijan Mickoski, stated at Saturday’s press conference that early elections are the only solution to this crisis and that VMRo-DPMNE’s red lines regarding Bulgaria are clear.

He added that Friday’s image of a group of frightened little people from the ruling parties, sitting next to each other, holding to their fear, ends an infamous generation of politicians who thought that they can put their personal pleasure and benefit above the people and their interest.

“They are a continuity of a very bad, thirty-year-old tradition in Macedonia of individuals in politics getting rich at the people’s expense, to sell out everything, including the people, while claiming that they are saving them. This is the essence of the problem, everything else is phrase and empty words”, Mickoski said.

Today’s press conference, Mickoski continued, is not an act of triumphalism – as opposed it is to SDS Friday’s nervous press conference by officials with distorted faces from fear for their careers and their future – nor it is an act of joy, because the situation in Macedonia is too serious, and the country is in a grievous situation.  Apart from the acute economic crisis, it now enters a political crisis. Hence, Mickoski asked to clarify several points.

“First, the Government’s claims that the acceptance of the Bulgarian diktat will determine if we are for or against the European Union or, as they simplify it, are we for the West or for the East. This is not the choice we face at all, so I ask everyone – the media, the reporters, the experts, and the entire public – not to fall for this lame manipulation. Because the majority of the people, and I as a party Chairperson, support the joining of the EU because it is our only path to the future. But not at the price of self-denial, not at the price of a diktat that will open Pandora’s box of disfiguring our identity and many other demands. A huge NO to repeating the game of stick and carrot, with no guarantees that we will join the EU whatsoever when the country will again face only the stick, that is another blockade. At the end of the day, we all believe in the Copenhagen Criteria, which certainly don’t include a neighboring state’s insanity, which shows a clear tendency to erase the existence and the history of another state. It is insanity to allow a neighboring state to make intrusion into another state’s history and collective memory and to pack all that as EU membership criteria. This government allowed for all that to happen”, Mickoski said.