Today’s meeting of the Mini Schengen initiative (relabeled as Open Balkan) marks another lie Zoran Zaev sold our citizens. He promised a European Macedonia, but now offers them a Mini Schengen Macedonia, said the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party. The leaders of Serbia and Albania are in Skopje today to promote the initiative that would relax border restrictions between them. But the problematic issue is that, with all of them, and especially Macedonia and Albania, stuck in their EU accession process, the initiative looks more and more as an alternative to joining the EU.

Macedonia belongs to the large European family of nations. These attempts from Zaev to present the normal multilateral cooperation between Balkan countries as some kind of an enormous diplomatic success is actually testament to his failure to accomplish the goal of EU membership. Besides all his defeats on the domestic front, the Zaev Government faces international defeats. For four years he shamelessly lied to the citizens about the state of Macedonian euro-integration, and now we are stuck in Mini Schengen, hostages to Zaev’s crime and corruption, and Macedonia has no European future, the conservative party said.

The initiative was renamed Open Balkan, in an attempt to do away with the clunky initial name. Zoran Zaev called on other countries to join, pointing at Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia, but all are wary of entering in another scheme that would be dominated by Belgrade and, apparently, Tirana. The Financial Times, which strongly supported Zaev’s Colored Revolution and power-grab, wrote a piece yesterday promoting the initiative as something that will contribute to bringing the countries close to the EU, but at the moment it seems that the move could be counterproductive, or have no actual impact.