Macedonia must not gamble away this opportunity to receive an invitation for membership at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, and it should accept UN mediator Matthew Nimetz’s last proposal “Republic of Macedonia (Skopje)”, with some corrections, Petkovski and Andov assess.

Macedonia is not in a position to demonstrate power. It must manifest statesmanship capacity and wisdom. The last thing that it needs now is a nervous reaction – discontinuation of the talks and defeatism. This is the message of the ruling coalition partners Tito Petkovski and Stojan Andov to Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. The prime minister said a couple of days ago that he considers change of the name for international use as strong blackmail, which he could not accept, and he stressed that if Greece vetoes Macedonia’s accession to NATO, “Macedonia will wait to enter NATO in some other decade”.