Brussels (The Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán blames Brussels for denting North Macedonia’s pride after further EU bid delay.
Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has blamed European Union officials for denting North Macedonia’s “national pride” by further slowing the country’s bid to join the bloc. During a visit to the land, Orbán also offered to negotiate with EU member Bulgaria, whose conflict with Skopje over Balkan history and heritage started the new delay.
What is orbán offering to resolve the Balkans dispute?
“We are here to offer the best solutions,” he stated, during a news conference with North Macedonia’s Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski. Those comments come after information that EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels decided to move ahead with Albania’s EU accession process, independently of North Macedonia’s.
Both countries started membership talks with Brussels in 2022 as the war in Ukraine pushed a rethink of the bloc’s enlargement process and up to now the two bids had been pushing together. Orbán expressed it would be “a big mistake” to separate the two.
How did Bulgaria’s conflict with Skopje cause further delay?
North Macedonia’s bid was hindered by a dispute with Bulgaria over Balkan history, language and culture. To crack the impasse, the previous centre-left government in Skopje assumed a Bulgarian demand to insert a connection to a Bulgarian ethnic minority in North Macedonia’s constitution. However, it lacked the parliamentary majority to induce the change, and Hristijan Mickoski’s new conservative government states it will only amend the constitution if Bulgaria first supports North Macedonia’s EU membership.
Previously, the country’s EU path was stopped for years by neighbouring Greece over another dispute over history and heritage. That was fixed with the 2018 Prespa Agreement which witnessed North Macedonia change its name from “the Republic of Macedonia”. Speaking at the UN General Assembly, North Macedonia’s President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova whined that her country’s slow progress towards EU membership was like “waiting for Godot”.
