Skopje, 3 July 2025 (MIA) -- The European Parliament's deletion of the Macedonian identity and language from its report has been done "the Taliban way," Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said Thursday in response to a reporter asking him to comment on Bulgarian media reports that the three major political groupings in the EP had agreed to strike out the phrases "Macedonian identity" and "Macedonian language" from the new report on the country's progress toward EU membership.

"Unfortunately, the charades going on for seven years here at home led us to this situation," the prime minister said.

"You see, there is a word I will use although I would rather not use it. But I will use it," Mickoski said.

"The Macedonian identity and Macedonian language have been deleted from the European report the Taliban way.

"This is what our nation has lived to see in the 21st century.

"This was done to us by Bujar Osmani, Dimitar Kovachevski, Bojan Marichikj and the rest of them," he said.

According to the Bulgarian news agency BGNES, the three largest political forces in the EP -- the European People's Party, the Socialists and Democrats as well as Renew Europe -- have agreed to remove the terms "Macedonian identity" and "Macedonian language" from the draft report on North Macedonia's progress, the vote on which is scheduled for July 8.

Bulgarian MEP Andrey Kovatchev confirmed the news in a social media post.

Mickoski said his party had warned that "this sort of engineering would happen."

"For us, deleting the Macedonian identity and Macedonian language from the report is just as bad as describing it as modern. It is literally just as bad," Mickoski said.

"But what is worth mentioning is that small step when the Macedonian language and Macedonian identity passed at the Committee on Foreign Affairs. This will remain in the collective memory. This was the first time the Macedonian language and Macedonian identity had ever passed in the EU capital of Brussels, the seat of European democracy," he said.

The prime minister added that once again it was publicly shown that Bulgaria's problem was not only "the introduction of a few hundred Bulgarians into the Constitution."

"The problem is much deeper than that," he said.

"All those who kept persuading us to change the Constitution, saying it was a done deal and all our problems would be solved, should come before the Macedonian citizens and apologize to them.

"And not only to the Macedonian citizens but also to the true well-wishers outside of Macedonia, politicians and persons who had been told it would be over as soon as this was solved," he said.

"They did not tell the truth or had no clue about doing politics," Mickoski said. mr/