The foreign minister will visit Albania and North Macedonia on Monday and Tuesday to support the two countries’ accession to the European Union, negotiations on which began on Tuesday.
“At a time when important progress has been made in the negotiation process for the accession of Albania and North Macedonia to the European Union (EU), the Portuguese MNE intends with this trip to Tirana and Skopje to reaffirm Portugal’s commitment to the aforementioned membership perspective,” reads a statement sent to Luce this Sunday.
On Monday, Minister Joao Gomes Cravinho will be in Tirana, where he will hold “meetings with his Albanian counterpart, with the ‘Speaker’ of Parliament and with Albania’s chief EU accession negotiator,” the statement said. day the MNE of Portugal will be in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, for meetings with the Prime Minister, the MNE of Macedonia and the Deputy Prime Minister with a portfolio of European Affairs.
On Tuesday the 19th, the European Union began accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania, and the “historic moment” was commemorated in a ceremony at the European Commission attended by President Ursula von der Leyen and the prime ministers of the two candidate countries.
The start of negotiations, long awaited by Skopje and Tirana, comes after North Macedonia signed on Sunday the 17th a bilateral protocol with Bulgaria that broke the protracted stalemate that also affected Albania, with the 27th “green light”. “. ‘ was given on Monday in connection with the celebration of the first intergovernmental meetings, which took place the next day in Brussels and were of purely political importance, but officially launched the negotiations.
“What a historic moment. Today, Albania and North Macedonia are opening negotiations on joining the EU. This is your success, this is the success of your peoples. remained confident in the enlargement process,” von der Leyen said, addressing the Prime Ministers of North Macedonia Dimitar Kovachevski and Albania Edi Rama.
North Macedonia has been blocked since 2005 in the EU lobby due to a Greek veto until 2018 and a Bulgarian dossier block in 2020 due to historical and cultural differences.
The consensus proposal adopted by Bulgaria and set out during France’s previous EU presidency, which ended at the end of June, calls for the immediate holding of a first Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) of a purely political nature, given that negotiations can only be initiated after the approval of a constitutional amendment that includes Bulgarians (about 3,500 people) as a constituent people of the Republic of North Macedonia, a proposal that has been the focus of new challenges.
The Macedonian opposition, numerous intellectuals, as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) close to the ruling Social Democrat-led coalition (SDSM) and less vocal parties rejected the proposal.
In their arguments, they believe that the proposal contains articles that Bulgaria could use to veto accession talks in the future.
Bulgaria insists that North Macedonia change some school textbooks and recognize that the Macedonian language has Bulgarian roots and that the two peoples had a common history in the past.
North Macedonia emphasized that its identity and the Macedonian language are non-negotiable.
A poll conducted in early July by the Institute for Policy Analysis (IPIS) showed that only 29% of respondents in this multinational country support the EU proposal.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
