Macedonia is not going to face a high deficit, because last year too in the heat of the crisis the country noted the second lowest budget deficit in Europe, said Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski regarding the conclusion of the IMF that the economy was recovering yet a challenge to many countries would still be their high budget deficits.

- At the sidelines of the international conference on Afghanistan in London, Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In their brief meeting, they talked about Macedonia’s contribution to the ISAF mission in Afghanistan and shared views of the talks between Macedonia and Greece regarding the bilateral name dispute.

 

Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki and Greek Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitris Droutsas had a first bilateral meeting in London, Thursday. Both Milososki and Droutsas agreed that the visit of mediator Matthew Nimetz at the end of February or beginning of March would be a good opportunity for Macedonia and Greece to elaborate on their positions once again and simultaneously give Nimetz a motivation for his engagement.  

Education Minister Nikola Todorov said Wednesday that he would not change his decision that students of non-Macedonian ethnic groups should learn the Macedonian language from the first grade even though OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Knut Vollebaek said in a letter to Prime Minister Gruevski that this was a sensitive issue and that hasty decisions should not be taken so as not to provoke disturbance.

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki will meet Greek Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitris Droutsas, Thursday evening in London.

The European Parliament Foreign Policy Committee adopted the amendments to the Macedonia report, demanding that Macedonia be set a date for starting membership negotiations in early March.
The rapporteur on Macedonia, Zoran Thaler, raised concern considering that the setting of a date had already been put off once and added if this happened again it could create ethnic tension and broader destabilization of the region.

 

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki opened Tuesday new premises of Macedonian embassy in Ljubljana, the Republic of Slovenia. At a press-conference Minister Milososki said that the date for start of negotiations does not only depend from Macedonia, but from Greece as well. It is a good sign for Milososki that Slovenia and few other countries are supporting the EU integration of Western Balkans in the course of the Spanish EU Presidency.

According to unofficial information, UN-appointed mediator Nimetz is going to visit Greece in the second half of February at the invitation of Greek Alternate Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas. Nobody in Macedonia has either confirmed or denied that Nimetz would come to Skopje although Macedonian authorities have notified Nimetz a few times over the past two months they were ready for a meeting in any format and in any place.

- On Tuesday, chief of Macedonian diplomacy Antonio Milososki will pay an official visit to Slovenia where he will meet with Slovenian President Danilo Turk and several members of the European Parliament.

 

At the working meeting between representatives of the Federation of Economic Chambers (SSK) and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski Monday, SSK welcomed the government steps for cutting profit tax, social contributions, and personal income tax and praised the two budget rebalances last year and the credit line from the European Investment Bank.

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski said the economic crisis in 2009 had a negative effect on the real sector in Macedonia and this caused the economic growth to slow down. According to Gruevski, Macedonia is going to end 2009 with a 0.6 percent decline of the economic activity. However, this is much less compared with other European countries.

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki sent a letter to his Greek counterpart Dimitris Droutsas for organizing a direct bilateral meeting in London on 28 January at the sidelines of the International Conference on Afghanistan. PM Nikola Gruevski is not optimistic that these meetings will bring something new but says that it is worth the effort.

Macedonian ambassador to the Netherlands and representative of the Macedonian lawsuit against Greece in the Hague-based International Court of Justice Nikola Dimitrov confirmed on Wednesday that state institutions received Greece’s counter-arguments regarding the lawsuit.  According to experts involved in this process, Greece will not wait for the epilogue of the lawsuit outcome and will most probably seek to reach a compromise solution in the dispute with Macedonia. 

Today’s start of the second term of the school year is not going to mark the beginning of the study of the Macedonian language by ethnic Albanian first-graders in spite of Education Minister Nikola Todorov’s categorical position that the government decision has to be put into practice. The minister is going to face a silent boycott. It is unclear though how the boycott will be carried out, whether students will be absent from schoolrooms or will stay inside with their teachers, ignoring Macedonia’s official language, Dnevnik reports.

- Greece should provide its counter-arguments to the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Wednesday. The Court will then consult both parties and decide when the procedure should begin.
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“One of the reasons for my visit is also to eliminate doubts of Macedonia’s public that Slovenia in any way has altered its positive position, supporting the need Macedonia to join the Euro-Atlantic institutions,” stated Pahor.

PM Nikola Gruevski said that he presented Pahor more details on the matter. “The Republic of Macedonia wishes to find a solution to this issue and as thus far we shall do our best to come to a settlement,” stated Gruevski.

The idea of resolving the name issue in stages that the leader of the Democratic Union, Pavle Trajanov, suggested is completely unacceptable to Greece, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski believes.

The first democratically elected Bulgarian president, Zelju Zelev, said Thursday that Greece was conducting disgraceful politics to Macedonia. He believes that Macedonia should keep its constitutional name as it was named in the Yugoslav federation for half a century. He wonders why Greece did not raise this issue at the time of Tito.

Friday, PM Nikola Gruevski will meet with NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the EU headquarters. Macedonia’s achievements and EU membership perspectives will be discussed at the meeting as well as the reform processes within the frames of the Euro-Atlantic integration.

Democratic Union MP Pavle Trajanov’s proposal for resolution of the name issue with Greece in stages is, in fact, a proposal of the Government that has recently been provided to UN mediator Matthew Nimetz, Vreme has learned from sources close to the Government. Trajanov confirmed he had sent the proposal to Nimetz and expects to receive an answer soon. His proposal has been previously well received by EU officials Olli Rehn and Jose Manuel Barroso, who assessed it as interesting and constructive. Trajanov presented his proposal also to the Greek officials in Skopje and says their reactions were positive, too.

According to an opinion poll of the International Republican Institute (IRI), if an election was held tomorrow, 30 percent of the electorate would vote for VMRO-DPMNE, 12 percent for SDSM, 8 percent for BDI, 6 percent for PDSH, 3 percent for Demokracia E Re, 1 percent for LDP, and slightly over 0 percent for United for Macedonia. 21 percent of the interviewed were uncommitted. According to the results of this poll, 94 percent of the people back Macedonia’s EU membership and 91 percent support the country’s NATO integration. The on-site poll was conducted on 17-22 December on a sample of 1,105 interviewees. The results of this poll do not differ much from the poll conducted in September.

Some 400 police officers protested Monday outside the Constitutional Court unsatisfied with the decision denying them the right to early retirement. Carrying banners on which it was written “Judges, don’t let politicians lead you on”, “While others get shares, we get bullets and injuries” and “Honorable retirement is the least we expect from society”, the police officers expressed their discontent, Vreme reports.

The police officers started their peaceful protest with the national anthem and then proceeded to voicing their demands and arguments.

 

Macedonia has been included in the list of 31 top tourist destinations worth visiting in 2010 of the New York Times. The paper describes Ohrid as a city of tradition and history with one of the planet’s deepest lakes. Ohrid is poised for international claim, the paper says. In addition to the churches and monuments, New York Times recommends also visiting the Bronze Age village built on stilts.

Israel and Macedonia are friends that have excellent cooperation, said Israeli President Shimon Peres and Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski at their meeting in Jerusalem Tuesday.
According to President Peres, Macedonia did the right thing renouncing the Balkan past and turning to the European future. Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski stressed that there were a lot of things Macedonia could learn from Israel and that one of their bridges of communication was the Jewish community in Macedonia.
The Macedonian prime minister is set to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday afternoon and Tzipi Livni, leader of the major opposition party Kadima, on Wednesday.

 

Starting Monday, PM Nikola Gruevski is on a three day visit to Israel. Gruevski presented investment potentials in Macedonia to Israeli businessmen, Monday. Gruevski’s main argument was the low taxes.

PM Nikola Gruevski offered to sell the Tutunski Kombinat Prilep, EMO from Ohrid and EuroKompozit from Prilep to Israeli businessmen. The Government has its own capital in these three companies.

The Greek Ministry of Defense wants to expropriate fields around four villages in the municipality of Ovcarani in northern Greece populated chiefly with Macedonians in order to expand the assault course. The residents of the villages have already announced an institutional battle both at home and on the international level. In October last year they strongly opposed the holding of the unannounced military maneuvers of the Greek army near the villages by forming a human shield around the village of Zabrdeni (Lofi) and refusing for two days to let the armored vehicles of the Greek army pass through the villages. They resisted the plan of turning the military camp into barracks that would house bigger military units, Dnevnik reports.

Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki says in his interview with Vecer that it has been long since NATO as the most serious military alliance experienced such ridicule of its credibility and principles as at the Summit in Bucharest with the Greek block on Macedonia’s deserved membership of the Alliance. Speaking about Macedonia’s red lines in the talks with Greece, Milososki said the international law was our line for defending the Macedonian identity and national dignity. Milososki expects successful outcome of the lawsuit against Greece, too.

After making changes in the party’s leadership, BDI leader Ali Ahmeti is going to request of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski a government reshuffle early next year. BDI officials say that the government reshuffle would most probably occur by the end of January. There is no information yet whether besides officials from BDI, officials from VMRO-DPMNE would be replaced, too. VMRO-DPMNE neither confirmed nor denied the speculation Tuesday. They say they will refrain from commenting on such information for the time being, Dnevnik reports.

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki announced that the opening of the EU membership negotiation talks will present the Government’s ultimate priority in 2010. On Monday, before the Foreign Policy Committee, FM Milososki stated that the southern neighbor uses the name issue for daily political goals and an agreement can be reached only with mutual respect of both nations. Milososki confirmed that the Government does not withdraw from the lodged appeal against Greece in the Hague.

The Parliament adopted Thursday the budget 2010, according to which revenues have been projected at 143, 257,000,000 denars and expenditures at 153,720,000,000 denars. The deficit has been projected at 2.5 percent of GDP, or 10, 460,000,000 denars. Revenues went up 3.4 percent and expenditures 2.8 percent. GDP would grow 2 percent and inflation will stand at 2 percent in 2010.