In a Kanal 5 TV interview, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev complained that Bulgaria misunderstood his expectations of the 2017 Zaev – Borisov treaty, and wants to have a dominant position in the relationship that was supposed to be among equals.

I used my narrative toward an honest desire to have excellent cooperation, the best friendship, that we are brothers. We wanted to achieve that through the Friendship Treaty, but suddenly they decided to become our fathers, Zaev said, in his usual style.

In the 2017 treaty, Macedonia agreed to rewrite its history, but as time went by Bulgaria increased its demands and now wants all “shared” historic figures to be declared as Bulgarians, and the Macedonian nation and language to be declared as recently derived from the Bulgarian.

We have our national roots and uniqueness. Nobody in the world negotiates about the identity and language and neither will we. These delays are because of pure politics, Zaev said, blaming the Bulgarian positions on the coming elections in that country.

He also came back to one of his most controversial comments – in which he began revising the World War Two history. In his infamous BGNES interview, Zaev said that Bulgaria did not occupy Macedonia during the war but merely administered it, and later even liberated it, when it switched sides from the Axis to the Allies in 1944. This comment caused a major rift in Zaev’s SDSM party, which long saw itself as keeper of the values of the partisan struggle in the Second World War, and former party leader Branko Crvenkovski, joined by many other former officials, called for Zaev’s ouster. Today, Zaev denied ever saying what he said:

I never said that Bulgaria administered Macedonia but that the Bulgarian administration, the Government at the time decided to join the Third Reich. Nobody asked the Bulgarian people at a referendum if they want to join with the fascists. Of course they were occupiers. Macedonia was occupied at the time, and finally it turned out that Bulgaria was also occupied and so it joined the anti-fascist armies. Of course it was occupation of the whole world by fascism. But we can’t paint fascism with an ethnic brush. We can’t say that the whole of Bulgaria was fascist, that is not friendly, Zaev explained.

VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski responded to Zaev’s comments, mainly the one about Macedonians being brothers with the Bulgarians:

We can be brothers, or a brother and sister, or two sisters if we come from same parents, but we are not brothers. We are anthropologically different. We saw where his friendship policy with a number of countries got us, we are the laughing stock with of the world. They laugh at us behind our backs – look at them, they changed their name, they gave up everything and got nothing. That is how the world sees us. It was an unserious, strategically mistaken approach, from the moment he was allowed to form a Government, Mickoski said about Zaev.