The opposition SDSM announced fresh attacks on Venko Filipče this week. Manasievski from the ruling VMRO-DPMNE declared: „There is no Bulgarian demand Venko Filipče won't meet in order to get into power”. The sentence is sharp, the accusations heavy, and the context - typical of Macedonia's current political condition, where every internal question is instantly wrapped up in relations with Bulgaria.

Manasievski, as is standard in statements like these, offered no concrete evidence of which Bulgarian demands Filipče was ready to meet. It is political rhetoric pointing at a broader perception that SDSM is more willing to compromise with Sofia than VMRO-DPMNE. Whether that is historically accurate, a tactical choice or pure marketing - that's another question.

At the same time, the debate on constitutional amendments has been reopened. SDSM insists: without constitutional changes, without recognition of minorities in the Constitution - Bulgarians, but also Serbs, Croats, Roma, Bosniaks, Turks and Albanians - there is no progress towards the EU. Timčo Mucunski, the foreign minister, sent a diplomatic note to the Bulgarian embassy in Skopje after terminological disagreements with his Bulgarian counterpart Čamova.

Manasievski claims SDSM is polling at 3 percent precisely because of this kind of politics. The number is debatable, but the general direction is clear - the party has a public-perception problem, especially after a term in which it had to accept the most complicated compromises for Macedonia in the last century.

The question neither party is willing to put on the table out loud: if EU integration requires constitutional changes, and those constitutional changes are politically unacceptable to a chunk of the public, what comes next? Will we spend the next twenty years in the same position - at the door, never inside, with a list of changes every government rejects in its own way?

Macedonians have been waiting 21 years for the EU. Every government punts responsibility to the next. And every opposition, once in opposition, offers ever more accessible solutions than the ones it used to attack. That is the political cycle of our state - and there is no clear way out of it.