A comment made by DUI’s Artan Grubi yesterday, as he urged against the resignation of Zoran Zaev, indicated the main motive behind the push to keep Zaev in office even after his major defeat in the local elections. Grubi said that “only he, and this Government can resolve the dispute with Bulgaria”, strongly implying that no other (sane) person will be open to accept the demands Bulgaria is imposing on Macedonia as it blocks Macedonia’s EU accession talks.
Some of the Bulgarian demands include amending the Constitution so that the Bulgarians are named among the constituent nations. Others include declaring a number of Macedonian heroes and whole chunks of history as Bulgarian, along with a push to declare the Macedonian nation and language as derivative from the Bulgarian.
The concessions he did so far cost Zaev badly in the polls, especially with his own SDSM party, where he faced an open rebellion last year. He tried to overcompensate for this by launching an exceptionally ugly campaign against Danela Arsovska, the VMRO-DPMNE supported mayoral candidate in the key race in Skopje, who he declared a “Bulgarian agent”. This even drew a rebuke from the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, which pointed to Zaev’s rhetoric as outrageous – after waiting for the elections to be over.
Bulgaria holds its own general and presidential elections in two weeks, and Zaev insisted that he will try to reach agreement with them on the growing historic dispute by the end of the year, once the elections are over. But it’s unclear whether he will even try to resume negotiations after his electoral defeat and announced resignation, as DUI asks him to do.
