Bulgarian nationalists did not care about the crisis and continue to fight with Macedonia
Bulgarian Defense Minister, leader of the nationalist party “VMRO-BND” Krasimir Karakachanov, in an interview with a North Macedonian TV channel, promised to block the neighbors’ path to the EU if they do not resolve “controversial historical issues.”
In doing so, the politician demonstrated that, amid the growing confrontation in Bulgaria, local nationalists are only interested in their ideological chimeras, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Last year in November, that is, ten months ago, the work of the intergovernmental commission, which was supposed to solve historical problems, stopped,” Krasimir Karakachanov said in an interview with the Macedonian TV channel TV24. – We have said this quite clearly, at least a hundred times in the last ten months, that if agreement on these issues is not reached, Bulgaria will object to the planning of the first conference (on the European integration of North Macedonia and Bulgaria - ed.) until then until the issues are resolved. This is Bulgaria’s position and this is very clear from Skopje.”
Krasimir Karakachanov
When Macedonian journalists asked the Bulgarian Defense Minister whether his words meant that the first intergovernmental conference - the actual start of negotiations on the accession of North Macedonia and Albania to the EU - would be blocked by Bulgaria, he replied: “Of course.”
“You agreed to change the flag (in 1995, at the request of Greece, the country replaced the Vergina star of the ancient Macedonian kings on the national flag with the sun in order to join the UN - ed.), change your name. And with a country that has always helped Macedonia, you think that you can act incorrectly. You know that in international relations there must be reciprocity, and when Bulgaria behaves like a gentleman, when it was the first country to recognize Macedonia, it must have mutual good treatment.”
Bulgaria demands that North Macedonia abandon the concept of the Macedonian language, considering it a dialect of the Bulgarian language, recognize such iconic heroes as one of the leaders of the anti-Turkish uprising Gotse Delchev as exclusively Bulgarian heroes, and many other concessions that will inevitably lead to the collapse of the national identity of the Macedonian Slavs.
In fact, the inhabitants of modern North Macedonia are indeed overwhelmingly ethnic Bulgarians, but during their time as part of Yugoslavia, for political reasons, they were instilled with an artificial Macedonian identity based on the Ukrainian model.
At the same time, the political conflict in Bulgaria caused by protests against the pro-Western prime minister, government and prosecutor general continues, and just today the authorities arrested six protest activists.
Nationalists chasing historical ghosts don’t care about the problems of modern Bulgarians
Against this background, Bulgarian nationalists supporting Prime Minister Boyko Borisov have once again demonstrated that the national-ideological pressure of their neighbors is more important to them than the situation inside Bulgaria.
Bulgarian nationalists ignore the crisis and continue to fight Macedonia.