Prime minister Hristijan Mickoski answered two questions that touch each other even though they come from different directions: the investigation opened in Hungary into the loan its Eximbank approved for Macedonia, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban's statement against accelerated EU membership.

On the investigation

"The investigation into the Hungarian loan is Hungary's internal matter. I assume the institutions there will do their job," Mickoski said.

Asked whether he feared it, the answer was direct: "Absolutely not, because all of that is part of our strategic partnership, plus it was confirmed by both parliaments and both governments, and the funds were spent transparently."

He expressed gratitude to Hungary, saying it was the first to help at a time when, as he put it, he was fighting to pull the country out of the state inherited from the previous government.

The claim that the loan was confirmed by both parliaments is a verifiable fact and the strongest part of the answer. But "spent transparently" is a different category from "approved by parliament" - one means the borrowing was legal, the other means every denar has a trace. The investigation in Budapest is not about our parliament.

On Orban's statement

On 2 September, after meeting European Council president Antonio Costa in Budapest, Orban announced that Hungary does not support accelerated procedures for any candidate country.

Mickoski is convinced this does not refer to us. "I am convinced that my colleague Orban did not mean the Balkans with that statement, because since he was elected prime minister of our strategic partner Hungary, there are several dozen statements in which he says the support for the Western Balkans, where we geographically belong, for accession to the European Union is unambiguous and sincere and has never been called into question. I think it refers to other candidate countries for EU membership."

Perhaps. But Orban's statement contains no exception - it says "no candidate country". Reading it as being about somebody else is an assumption, not a quotation, and it leans on earlier statements rather than on this one.

The Balkans has long experience of this. Every less favourable sentence out of Brussels or out of some capital is first read as being addressed to somebody else, and it usually turns out it was addressed to everyone.

The strategic partnership with Hungary is a reality with a loan behind it. The question is whether that partnership changes Budapest's position on enlargement, or merely creates the expectation that it will.