The group of experts on constitutional changes concluded, during yesterday’s meeting, the proposal to revise the Constitution of North Macedonia.

The proposal will be submitted to the government, which will then have to forward to the parliament a relevant initiative for the processing of the proposal by the competent parliamentary committees.

The head of the expert group, Margarita Tsača Nikolovska, stated that the amendments concern mainly the preamble of the Constitution with the addition of various ethnicities.

“With the group’s proposal, Bulgarians, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Jews and (Balkan) Egyptians are added to the Constitution,” said Margarita Tsatsa Nikolovska.

The Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Dimitar Kovacevski, said that from Monday the government will examine the proposal of the expert committee, while also inviting the leader of the largest opposition party, VMRO-DPMNE, which opposes this amendment to the Constitution, to a meeting in order to to examine the European course of the country.

The possibility of amending the Constitution, based on an agreement between North Macedonia and Bulgaria, in order to include the Bulgarian minority living in the country, is causing tremors in Skopje, with relations between the two countries being tense.

For the past two years, Bulgaria has prevented the start of North Macedonia’s accession negotiations with the EU due to open ethnic, linguistic and historical differences between the two countries, which has provoked strong reactions from Skopje.

However, last summer, the two countries reached an agreement, based on a proposal from the European Union, under which Sofia would lift its veto on Skopje’s opening of accession negotiations with the EU, provided that North Macedonia will proceed to amend its Constitution, with the inclusion in it of the Bulgarian minority living in the country.

This agreement provokes strong reactions from North Macedonia’s largest opposition party, the right-wing VMRO-DPMNE, which has declared in all tones that it will not consent to such an amendment to the country’s Constitution.

Amending the Constitution of North Macedonia requires a 2/3 majority in Parliament, which the government in Skopje and the parties supporting the agreement with Bulgaria do not currently have.

According to the last population census carried out in 2021 in North Macedonia, Bulgarians make up only 0.2% of the country’s population (a total of 3,500 people), a fact which the official Sofia disputes and considers the percentage of Bulgarians in North Macedonia it is much larger.