SKOPJE (dpa-AFX) – The government of North Macedonia is proposing an amendment to the constitution to meet a demand from EU neighbor Bulgaria as a prerequisite for substantive EU accession talks. On Tuesday, the cabinet approved the proposal to supplement the preamble to the constitution, which should now also mention the Bulgarian minority in North Macedonia as one of the country’s peoples, as the news portal “libertas.mk” reported.
Bulgaria had blocked the start of EU accession talks with North Macedonia from 2020 to 2022 with various demands regarding ethnic group rights and interpretation of history. The accession talks finally began a year ago with an intergovernmental conference. However, further substantial negotiations can only take place when the Bulgarian minority, which comprises around 3,000 people, is mentioned in the preamble to the constitution.
During EU accession negotiations, which often drag on for many years, every EU country can veto any intermediate step. A year ago, the social-democratic North Macedonian government of Dimitar Kovacevski agreed with the then government in Sofia on a roadmap for settling the disputed issues.
Their problem, however, is that without the nationalist opposition, they would not have the necessary two-thirds majority in parliament to pass the constitutional amendment. The opposition is currently taking the position that it does not want to agree to it.
The preamble currently enumerates Macedonians, Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Wallachians, Roma and Bosniaks, and “Others” as peoples living in North Macedonia. With the change, Croatians, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Jews and Egyptians are now to be mentioned in the preamble in addition to the Bulgarians./gm/DP/stw