Skopje, 2 July 2022 (MIA) – Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani said Saturday the French EU Presidency proposal is good, opens the country’s path and gives the country an opportunity to catch the last train for the EU, while not accepting it brings the risk of no perspectives, crises, interethnic tensions and leaving the country stuck in the Balkan mud. “Topics of new unions, new political unions have already started to emerge. If we don’t start now, Albania will and we stay behind, while Bulgaria heads to elections. Considering the opinion polls, they will probably not have a government in place over the next year or two and the issue will get stuck in the years to come. This means that we will implode considering all the crises that will emerge from having no perspective. There are still people here who have families and hope for a European perspective, keep their children here. If we say no, if the people realize there is no future here, thousands of them will take passports from neighboring countries and leave the country because of no future,” FM Osmani told a press briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Osmani warned of interethnic tensions and tensions among various groups of citizens in such a scenario, also bearing in mind the hardest winter in terms of energy, global food crisis etc. “Amid circumstances where the world is at war, we are talking about false interpretations that someone will ‘bulgarize‘ us, when the reality is that everything depends on us. No one can make us accept something, in any form, on anything. I think it will be irresponsible and shameful to have the same policy on these issues just for the purpose of someone becoming a minister of prime minister. We have invested our entire political capital on this issue, at the expense of our careers and our political parties, but these are times when statesmen make decisions,” said Osmani. By not accepting this proposal, he added, we will reject the possibility of closing the issue of the Macedonian language once and for all, its rejection would keep the country stuck in the Balkan mud and the EU perspective would be lost forever. “Considering all these arguments, not only mine but of experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who have never been affiliated to parties, they all say – this must be accepted because our positions are taken into account, because rejection will mean that we cross out our European perspectives for good. The logic to be blocked out of fear of remaining blocked in the coming decades is a pathological one,” said Osmani.