A day after the protests of high-school students and their parents, VMRO-DPMNE issued a statement supporting their demands for in-person teaching with printed textbooks. The protests and boycotts of classes began after Education Minister Mila Carovska announced a plan to move to digital only textbooks, which students fear will affect poor families but also ensure that the online classes become permanent.

We are in favor of modernizing the education system, but we also want to have actual textbooks in use and to have in-person teaching. We all see the consequences of the online education as it is implemented so far. Carovska needs to listen to the protesters and stop experimenting with the children, the opposition party said in its press release.

It is widely assumed that the main reason behind this hastily proposed “reform” is the need to accommodate demands from Bulgaria and Greece, who want Macedonia to rewrite its history and other textbooks and accept their views on the history and the nation founding in the Balkans.