The Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Christian Mickoskiwill attend the inauguration of the new US president, Donald Trumpon January 20 in Washington, government sources in Skopje said. Pro-government media in Skopje report that Chr. Mickoski is one of the few European leaders who received an invitation to attend the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Its prime minister himself North Macedoniain an interview with the country’s state news agency “MIA”, announced that on January 18 he is leaving for the USA and, among other things, as he said, he will ask for the support of the USA in his country’s European course, which remains stuck, mainly due to objections of Bulgaria. As Mr. Mickoski mentioned, during his visit he will have many meetings and talks with important officials of the new US government.

“Besides Brussels, the Washington it is an extremely important place for us, as a country and as a government. I will have really high-quality meetings, as agreed so far, with government leaders in Washington and I expect to attract attention so that they see the Balkans from a different point of view”, said Hr. Mickoski.

The Prime Minister of North Macedonia, in the same interview, expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that the European perspective of his country remains “frozen”, due to the bilateral differences that his country has with Bulgaria.

He argued that the European course of candidate countries for joining the EU has become “hostage” to bilateral issues.

“Now Croatia says that Montenegro cannot close such and such a chapter due to some issues… Bulgaria says the same about Serbia, etc. All that started at the time when our southern neighbor (ie Greece) was constantly raising obstacles, both in NATO and in the EU, because of a bilateral issue, the name issue, etc., is now slowly but surely becoming practice. And here the problem lies with the EU itself, because instead of taking into account the positive experiences of the past – one such positive experience was the dispute between Croatia and Slovenia – and instead of treating these bilateral differences in the same way, what do we have did it happen “Bilateralization” became a tool, i.e. instead of us becoming Europeans, Europeans became Balkans and that is the biggest problem now for us here. In practice, the process of accession negotiations has been “Balkanized”. “Instead of Europeanizing ourselves, the process was “Balkanized” because of this way of decision-making,” said the Prime Minister of North Macedonia.