Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski has said he will not allow constitutional amendments of the kind Bulgaria is demanding to happen in this form, but that talks will continue. „I am ready to talk to anyone, anywhere. I am not a second in a duel, here to tell you until when,” he said.

The strongest part of his appearance is not the refusal but the argument behind it. Mickoski raised a point that has rarely been put this bluntly in the negotiations with Sofia - the question of reciprocity.

„We are aware of what some previous government agreed to, but equally, some previous government in Bulgaria agreed to something called respect for human rights,” the prime minister said. He added that there are a dozen rulings from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg concerning the Macedonian community in Bulgaria - that its rights be respected, that clubs and organisations be allowed to register. That, he says, is not being honoured, while we are being asked to honour our side.

„That is called bullying, and it has nothing to do with the Copenhagen criteria, nor with the EU values defined by Schuman, De Gasperi and Adenauer,” Mickoski said.

The sentence that carries the whole story

The best image of the entire interview is a culinary one. „This is not a buffet where I like this, I do not like that, I will take this and leave that. No, these are principles. The more you play with principles, the less you weigh as a person.”

Then comes the part every citizen of this country can check for themselves, without any analysis. We changed the constitutional name. We changed the flag. We changed banknotes. We amended the constitution several times. Mickoski recalled being told: just change the name and you go straight into NATO, you open negotiations, and in four or five years you are an EU member.

„Those four or five years passed three years ago, and we are still in the same place we were before we changed the constitutional name,” the prime minister said.

That is a sentence no opponent in this country can knock down with facts, because it is arithmetic, not politics. The question left hanging is a different one, and it is aimed at that same government: if the interim solutions are rejected and the condition does not change, what exactly is the plan besides waiting? Mickoski says he will talk when there is a solution on the table that takes us inside, and in the meantime the work goes on the reform agenda.

That is a position you can defend logically. But the reform agenda is something that has to be implemented anyway, with Sofia or without it. And the citizen waiting for that agenda in a hospital, in a courtroom or at a counter will judge this government on exactly that - not on who called whom a bully.