How fast the process of our integration in the EU will be depends both on Brussels and on the member states, but mostly on us. We are not implementing the reforms to satisfy European bureaucrats, but to fundamentally change our society and the work of our institutions, President Stevo Pendarovski told the Fifth Plenary Session of the National Convention on the European Union in the Republic of Macedonia (NCEU-MK), taking place in Parliament.

According to the president, the focus should not be on the technical fulfillment of membership criteria, but on the quality of the process, because there is no other way for the reforms to be sustainable and to stop the negative trends we are facing in the area of the rule of law.

Only by leaving the comfort zone of political declarations, the process of accession to the European Union will have the transformative power that we need more than ever, said Pendarovski.

The general impression among our citizens, as he said, unfortunately, is that some of the undertaken reforms are either not sustainable in the long term or do not have the necessary degree of direct, positive impact on the daily life of the citizens. This, he stressed, especially refers to the numerous changes and announcements of changes in the sphere of the rule of law.

More than 15 years have passed since the first major reforms in this sphere in 2005, and citizens’ trust in the judiciary and in general in the functionality of our legal state, as he said, is at a record low level.

We have witnessed that the lack of legal certainty and the feeling that party and ethnic affiliation are more important than the knowledge and skills you possess are among the main reasons for the emigration of a large number of young people. At the same time, a part of those who are well established in society with established careers and a solid standard of living for our conditions also emigrate. For them, of course, and for everyone else, a functional legal state is a matter of quality of life, said Pendarovski.

In that sense, he added, it is no coincidence that the rule of law and the fight against organized crime and corruption are included in the cluster of “basic issues”, that is, fundamental values in the process of accession to the European Union.