VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski said that the there are three potential outcomes from the June European Council, but none leads to Macedonia opening its EU accession talks.

One option is that Sofia will lift its veto and allow the first inter-governmental conference to take place, but to delay the opening of actual EU accession talks until the Constitution is amended and the Bulgarian nation added to the preamble. The second option is that Sofia lifts the veto, but that the requests from the Bulgarian Parliament’s declaration from November 2019 are made part of the negotiating framework. I hope that a number of other EU member states will not allow that to happen because bilateral issues should not be made part of the framework. And the third option is that the veto remains. In all three possibilities, the accession talks won’t begin, Mickoski said.

He reiterated the VMRO position that they will support amending the Constitution, but only if the Bulgarian Parliament gives written guarantees that this will be the last bilateral issue they raise with Macedonia in the course of the accession talks. “IF the Parliament confirms that this closes all open issues between Macedonia and Bulgaria, and that, from that point on, they will not block Macedonia within the EU framework, then we will support the amendment”, Micokski said.