Prime Minister Zoran Zaev blamed the stalled EU perspective for the latest round of talk aimed at partitioning Macedonia and redrawing Balkan borders. A group of Albanian nationalist politicians from Macedonia announced yesterday that they are forming a party that will advocate forming a federal Albanian unit within Macedonia. And before that, officials from Zaev’s party and media outlets close to him advanced a conspiracy theory that the Slovenian Government will be proposing a push to redraw borders during the second half of the year when they hold the rotating Presidency of the European Council.

This should be a signal to Bulgaria and to Brussels that they should advance the process of EU integration of the region, and to pay off the debt toward the Western Balkan countries, and to Macedonia to whom their debt is ten times bigger, Zaev said in a TV interview with an Albanian language station. He insisted that “Macedonia is an example of a country using the principle of One Society For All to unite all its different ethnic communities”.

Last week Zaev again insisted that the NATO membership will protect Macedonia from internal or regional strife, but added that he can’t discount the threat of the Greater Albania project.