North Macedonia remains in the waiting room of the European Union after Bulgaria’s objections caused the Council of Ministers to fail to adopt a negotiating framework on Tuesday that would have allowed Skopje to start EU accession talks before the year’s end as previously envisaged.

Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva told media that her country is ready to give the green light to Albania’s negotiating framework, but not to the one for North Macedonia.

“I expressed the Bulgarian position, so at this phase, we cannot approve the negotiating framework with North Macedonia,” Zaharieva said.

“Bulgaria is open for talks [with North Macedonia] and I would like to see more efforts being put in the progress of the talks, rather than in the campaign against Bulgaria,” she added.

She said that a candidate country cannot start accession talks if it has unresolved issues with an EU member state.

Bulgaria wants to scrap from the EU negotiating framework the use of the term ‘Macedonian language’, which despite being recognised by the UN in 1977, Bulgaria still insists is just a dialect of the Bulgarian language.

Bulgaria would like to see the use of the formulation, “the language according to the Constitution” of North Macedonia, which has been used since 1999 strictly in bilateral documents between the two countries.

Bulgaria also insists that North Macedonia should accept Sofia’s views on certain parts of the two countries’ shared history, most notably the alleged Bulgarian origin of the Ottoman era revolutionary Goce Delcev, who is celebrated as a national hero in both countries.