site.btaBulgarian Government Leader Has "Very Good Discussion" with North Macedonia’s President, Talks Human Rights and European Values

Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov said he had a very good discussion with the President of the Republic of North Macedonia, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, in The Hague on Wednesday.

“We talked about human rights, about European values,” Zhelyazkov said. His statement came as a response to Siljanovska-Davkova being quoted as saying she had a “pleasant and friendly protocol discussion” with him before the dinner on the sidelines of the NATO summit in the Netherlands.

"I wanted to talk to the President of North Macedonia because, as you know, Bulgaria's position is that the Republic of North Macedonia should be part of the European Union. We had a very good discussion, we talked about human rights, we talked about European values, we talked about the fact that the language of the official representatives of the countries should promote friendship and not hatred. I will make an analogy, the goal of our friends from North Macedonia is not to conquer Babylon, but to enter the European Union, which happens by fulfilling the membership criteria," Zhelyazkov said.

Zhelyazkov’s remarks come against a tense backdrop: on June 24 the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee adopted North Macedonia’s progress report after rejecting a last-minute bid to describe its “nation and language” as “modern”, a change Bulgarian MEPs and President Rumen Radev said would undermine the 2022 French-brokered compromise on minority rights. Radev has since written to EU leaders warning Sofia will not tolerate any dilution of that deal, while GERB leader Boyko Borissov has pledged that the European People’s Party will table amendments restoring the compromise at next month’s Strasbourg vote. In Skopje, Prime Minister of North Macedonia Hristijan Mickoski dismissed the committee vote as a setback and accused unnamed MEPs of trying to re-engineer his country’s identity, vowing to fight the amendments.