After 24 Years, Ahmeti Finally Put the State Flag in His Office - But on the Ambassadors' Advice

It took Ali Ahmeti twenty-four years to place the state flag in his office. And in the end, it did not happen out of inner conviction - but on the suggestion of foreign ambassadors.

The DUI leader, Ali Ahmeti, 24 years after founding the party, has set up the state flag of Macedonia in his office at the party headquarters in Mala Rečica. The flag was captured in photographs he himself published after a meeting with the Austrian ambassador, Martin Pammer.

Explaining the move, Ahmeti said that displaying the state flag had never been a problem for him. „I have always been for a unitary state. That was also the proposal of the foreign ambassadors in the country. It was suggested to me at meetings with them that the state flag of the state be placed in my office,” he said.

According to Ahmeti, the move is in line with the belief that the state belongs to all its citizens and that state symbols must be respected. It is hard to argue with that sentence. The question is why it took 24 years and one foreign ambassador to arrive at it.

Because if state symbols really were never a problem, as Ahmeti says, then their absence for two decades was not accidental - it was a message. And the fact that the flag appears precisely now, at the moment when Ahmeti is talking about European integration, the Ohrid Agreement and „shared institutional responsibility” in front of the Austrian ambassador, suggests that the symbolism here is not accidental but calculated.

Some will see this as a step forward, as a gesture of respect towards the state you live in. Others will ask what a flag is worth when it is put up on someone's advice, and not out of one's own conviction. Both views are legitimate. But the fact remains - the state flag of Macedonia finally stands in the office of the man who for decades shaped inter-ethnic relations in this country. After 24 years.