If Zaev really doesn’t understand the nature of the dispute with Bulgaria and what he is negotiating about, he shouldn’t have made all the promises and concessions he did, opposition leader Hristijan Mickoski said, reacting to a recent comment from Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who declared that he doesn’t know what the issue with Bulgaria is all about.

This is not a game, this is not a circus arena. Talks of the nature we are having with Bulgaria require a strategy. If you steer off the path, you will have problems, and Zaev did just that, Mickoski said during his MRTV interview this evening.

According to the VMRO-DPMNE leader, the main problem Zaev made was in agreeing to the joint committee of historians with Bulgaria, which is now under pressure to accept Bulgarian claims on Macedonian history.

The reality is that Bulgaria is part of NATO and the EU, it has a greater BDP. We are smaller, and we need to be smart and strategic in our placement. What Zaev did was open talks on issues that no person alive would agree to open and discuss, Mickoski said.

He pointed to statements from Zaev, such as the one that there is no difference in the language spoken in Strumica in Macedonia and Petric in Bulgaria as moves that only open more issues.

How can Zaev claim that he is not touching the issue of the language in the talks when he makes statements like that? Could there be any greater opening of historic issues that the claim that they were not occupiers here but administrators, and that they liberated Kumanovo and Kriva Palanka. That the first shots in Kumanovo were between two portions of the Bulgarian people who had a mutual dispute, and not because the Bulgarian army was fascist, collaborating with fascists, and occupied Macedonia in the Second World War and the Macedonian people, along with all other peoples who live here, rose up in opposition?, Mickoski asked.