Cold shower from Brussels

 

 At the last Council of the Year, EU member states failed to agree to hold the first intergovernmental conferences with  Macedonia and Albania by the end of this year, despite public appeals from the Slovenian presidency. The final document of the meeting did not include the specification "until the end of the year" as a deadline for holding the first intergovernmental conferences with Skopje and Tirana, according to the e-edition of the Macedonian newspaper Sloboden Pechat in an article entitled "Cold Shower from Brussels. "

  The European Commission and the Council of the EU expressed satisfaction with the agreement reached on enlargement, which European Commission Vice-President Vera Yourova described as "a masterpiece of the EU's ability to compromise".

Slovenian State Secretary for European Affairs Gasper Dovjan said the meeting was a success and was "an example of the spirit of compromise and loyal EU cooperation".

 "The conclusions of the Council are important, we do not compare them with previous projects, some wording is here from two months ago and more, but since negotiations on such documents are very long, I would definitely rate today as a success. "What we initially expected to achieve was not feasible this year, and that is the factual reason why 'this year' is no longer in the conclusions," Dovjan said after the Brussels meeting.

 The conclusions remove the explicit reference that links the enlargement process to Macedonia to the implementation of the agreement with Bulgaria, but that reference is present in the negotiating framework itself, diplomats explained. According to them, if Macedonia takes the step of adopting this negotiating framework, the question remains how to conduct a diplomatic battle on that basis so as not to allow the negotiation process to be trapped in the bilateral dispute between Skopje and Sofia.

 Before yesterday's meeting of the General Affairs Council, the Prime Minister of our southwestern neighbor Zoran Zaev in a telephone conversation congratulated Kiril Petkov on his election as Prime Minister of Bulgaria and the two agreed to continue working to find an acceptable solution to unblock the negotiation procedure Macedonia.

In the conversation, readiness was expressed to speed up communication and co-operation through several working groups in the fields of economy, culture, healthcare, energy, infrastructure and other areas of interest to Macedonian and Bulgarian citizens.

"We agreed to continue working to find an acceptable solution to unblock the procedure for starting the negotiations for Northern Macedonia's membership in the EU and for a new positive impetus to strengthen bilateral relations between our two countries, in the name of a common European future." Zaev explained in a post on the social network Facebook.