Macedonia Should Swiftly Join EU to Remain Stable, Country's FM Says

Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said on Friday that the only way for the country to remain peaceful is to join the European Union.

BRUSSELS (Sputnik) — The acceleration of Macedonia’s accession to the European Union will help ensure stability in the country, Poposki said.

"We need more focus on the integration and on bringing more certainty in our future membership in the European Union if we want to make our region peaceful and definitely to stabilize Macedonia," Poposki told reporters ahead of the informal meeting of the EU member states’ foreign ministers in Malta.

Less integration is not the answer, the minister explained, commenting on the remarks made by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who said that the latest events in Macedonia do not contribute to the country’s EU integration process.

On Thursday, Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian, was elected speaker of the Macedonian parliament. Xhaferi's appointment has led to an outbreak of clashes inside and outside the parliament building, during which protesters attacked several opposition lawmakers and blocked others.

In 2015, the Macedonian opposition accused the ruling conservatives of intercepting telephone conversations of some 20,000 people, including police officers, judges, journalists and diplomats. The accusations led to a political crisis, which ended in resignation of then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and dissolution of the parliament.

The early parliamentary election, held in December 2016, resulted in Macedonia’s conservative VMRO-DPMNE party and opposition Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) party winning 51 and 49 seats, respectively, as well as a failure to form a coalition government.