With 10 votes “for”, 7 “against” and no “abstentions”, the parliamentary commission for constitutional changes in the Assembly of North Macedonia decided to start the procedure for changes to the constitution.
So the process in Parliament began, but it was confirmed that at this stage the required two-thirds majority for their adoption could not be gathered, since the largest opposition party VMRO-DPMNE remains “against”.
For their adoption, the votes of the 44 VMRO-DPMNE deputies in the 120-seat parliament are needed. With them, Bulgarians will also be included in the constitution, which is Sofia’s main requirement for Skopje to start real negotiations for EU membership.
The session of the parliament, at which the procedure will begin, is scheduled for August 18.
Until then, the rulers will have to provide 80 deputies to support the opening of the basic law.
“If no changes are made to the constitution, our path to the EU stops and this will have an impact on our relations with the US,” Macedonian Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski told the parliament.
Constitutional changes are embedded in North Macedonia’s negotiating framework, and if they are not adopted, the country could be separated from Albania on its way to the EU.
“The truth is that there won’t be a better agreement and there won’t be another negotiation framework, and that’s what the European Union is saying,” Kovacevski said, quoted by BGNES.
As expected, the deputies from VMRO-DPMNE voted against the changes in the commission, and the leader of the party, Christian Mickoski, explained that they are supported by “all those Europeans who buy properties for millions in the center of Skopje and drive expensive cars”.
The main supports of VMRO-DPMNE are that the changes are being made under Bulgarian dictation and threaten the identity of North Macedonia. In addition, Mickoski’s party claims that the negotiating framework can be renegotiated.
Foreign Minister Buyar Osmani addressed VMRO-DPMNE with the words that “there is no greater Bulgarianization than taking out a Bulgarian passport”.
“Every day we are getting more and more late for the EU. Macedonians take out a Bulgarian passport, for which you have to declare in Sofia that you are Bulgarian by origin. There is no greater Bulgarianization than taking out a passport, as a result of the delay in integration, the number of these passports reaches 100,000. The inclusion of Bulgarians in the constitution is a formalization of the fact that we are talking about two different peoples. For the first time in the constitution, we will have the Macedonian people as the majority and part of the Bulgarian people as a minority”, Osmani said, quoted by BTA.
