site.btaUPDATED President Comments on French Proposal for Unblocking Skopje's EU Accession Talks

Taking a journalist’s question on Saturday, President Rumen Radev commented on Friday’s news that a French proposal for lifting Bulgaria's veto on the start of EU accession negotiations with Skopje, has been received by the parliamentary Foreign Policy Committee. In Radev’s words, the Government not only failed to elaborate a Bulgarian proposal on the matter and is now tabling the French one, but is also transferring the full responsibility to the National Assembly, without expressing a position. “The Prime Minister cannot table someone else’s proposal without expressing his opinion. He is not a courier, he is a prime minister,” Radev told reporters. 

He described the French proposal as a step in the right direction but added that many questions remain that should be made clear before the veto cant be lifted. Asked what questions he was referring to, Radev said: “The inclusion of Bulgarians in the Constitution [of North Macedonia] before the start of the negotiations is a compulsory but insufficient condition. It is no less important to have clear mechanisms and measurable criteria for eradicating the decade-old policy of de-Bulgarianization, theft and falsification of Bulgarian history, for restoring destroyed monuments and symbols of the Bulgarian national spirit in those lands.”

Also necessary is to protect Bulgarian cultural and historical heritage, eradicate hate speech and vindicate all victims and people repressed only because they continued calling themselves Bulgarians, Radev said.

Asked to comment on Friday's words of Prime Minister Kiril Petkov that the President should come to stand on the right side of history, Radev said that the fight against corruption consists in reforming the Judiciary, and that reform has stopped. In his words, many of the people with whom "we led and continue to lead together the fight against corruption and lawlessness", are outside of Parliament. "The position of prime minister comes with a high concentration of power and if there is a trust issue, it is solved not in the street but through governance decisions and actions," the head of State told reporters.