Reports that Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Dimitrov was bragging that he prevented Zoran Zaev from signing another, even more harmful treaty with Bulgaria, have opened the prospect of Dimitrov’s siding with the faction in SDSM that calls for Zaev’s ouster.
In his infamous BGNES interview, Zaev announced his readiness to accept all of the Bulgarian demands aimed at Macedonian history and national identity. But Zaev failed to follow up on that with a legally binding new treaty, as he faced opposition protests in the streets and calls to resign from former top officials of his own SDSM party led by former President and Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski. And now, VMRO-DPMNE Vice President Aleksandar Nikoloski revealed that even Nikola Dimitrov was making sure it is known that he prevented Zaev from signing a new treaty with Bulgaria.
Is Zaev aware that his deputy Dimitrov is going around briefing journalists and opinion makers that it was him who stopped the signing of a treaty with Bulgaria? Dimitrov says that Zaev was ready to do it, but that Dimitrov and the Skopje wing of the SDSM party stopped him, Nikoloski said.
Dimitrov doesn’t have serious roots in SDSM – his family and he himself always sought to advance their interests through the VMRO-DPMNE party, until Nikola Dimitrov sided with Zaev in the 2015 Colored Revolution. But he was named on the top of the SDSM ticket in downtown Skopje for the 2020 elections, making him officially a prominent party leader in the area where Zaev faces the most resistance to his new Bulgaria policy. And recently a close Zaev associate publicly called for Dimitrov’s removal, proposing that he is made to bear the brunt of the failed Bulgaria policy.
In the coming days, Dimitrov is about to face a vote of no confidence in the Parliament initiated by VMRO-DPMNE, which the opposition party plans to be the first step in the removal of the entire Zaev regime.
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