site.btaBelgian EU Council Presidency Sends Mediator to North Macedonia to Facilitate Constitutional Changes

An old friend of North Macedonia, Belgian Peter Vanhoutte, is back in the country, this time as a mediator for the constitutional changes that should pave the way for the country's EU accession, the website nezavisen.mk reports.

According to the newspaper, Vanhoutte is in Skopje where has already held meetings with representatives of some political parties and will also meet with NGOs and other experts in the country, after which he will travel to Sofia for similar meetings.

"Nezavisim.mk" quotes Vanhoutte as saying that on the initiative of the Belgian EU Council presidency he was given a mandate to mediate "the Bulgarian-Macedonian dispute". The project is under the auspices of the EU but is funded by the Belgian government, which believes in the usefulness of talks and reaching compromises. The project will be led by the EU Institute for Security Studies and "will remain open until the objectives are achieved".

The project will have two components, the first is mediation between Bulgaria and North Macedonia, which should remove open issues and open the way for North Macedonia to negotiate with the EU. The second component is institutional capacity building in the country with a focus on training young politicians to bring the country closer to Western European democracies, the newspaper writes.

"My main goal will be to ensure that North Macedonia's EU accession process is no longer blocked," Vanhoutte told the publication.

"I am optimistic that we will find a solution. I have the feeling that there is an understanding in the two biggest political parties that we need to move forward. First we will make sure that there will be no new problems from Bulgaria regarding North Macedonia's EU accession and then we will move on to the next steps," Vanhoutte said, stressing that constitutional changes are the number one priority and his role as a mediator will be to have solid guarantees that things will not go in the wrong direction for North Macedonia again, the newspaper said.