Original title: There are no negotiations this year, Germany is changing its opinion
The portal Infomax.mk on 1st of July, 2020, published an article entitled: There are no negotiations this year, Germany is changing its opinion. The source of the text is the Serbian portal B92, which referred to Tanjug.
The text reads: A senior German official in presenting the agenda of the presidency until the end of the year, mentioned enlargement and the Western Balkans after the media insisted to get the answers. “He could not ‘promise’ that by the end of the year the first official conferences with North Macedonia and Albania will be organized, which are still waiting for the confirmation of the negotiating framework,” B92 writes.
On 1st of July, 2020, Germany takes over the presidency of the European Union. This was used by the Infomax portal to publish a tendentious and manipulative headline. Тhe text also contains the answer of the German representative: “We will do our best to advance with the enlargement and to organize intergovernmental conferences during the six months of the German presidency.”
But that was not enough for the author, so he published the text with the title in which he claims that there will be no negotiations, Germany allegedly has changed its opinion.
This claim is not true. Germany, which took over the presidency of the EU Council on 1st of July, hopes that this will happen during its presidency.
And as 360 stepeni.mk wrote, German Minister for European Affairs Michael Roth said that his country hopes that the first intergovernmental conference with North Macedonia and Albania will be held this fall, MIA reports from Brussels.
The intergovernmental conference marks the de facto start of membership talks with the Union and the opening of the first chapter. Asked if there are any prospects for North Macedonia to start negotiations during Germany’s EU presidency, Roth said yes. “We gave the green light for North Macedonia and Albania. It was very difficult to convince our EU partners, and I hope we can officially start negotiations with the first intergovernmental conferences during the German presidency. “Maybe in the autumn and finally I hope we will be more active in the region, this is crucial,” Roth said.
Germany’s presidency of the European Union will focus on tackling the pandemic crisis, but the official program “Together for Europe’s Recovery” also includes the European Union’s enlargement to the Western Balkans.
“We are looking for a credible EU accession perspective for the Western Balkan countries.” Their rapprochement with the European Union is in the common interest of the Western Balkans and the strategic interest of the EU. “Against this, we are actively pursuing the ongoing accession talks between Serbia and Montenegro and preparing to start accession talks with Albania and North Macedonia by drafting a negotiating framework for these two countries, taking into account the new enlargement methodology.”
Given this, it is clear that this is a text whose purpose is to undermine public confidence in the European Union and certainly to encourage dissatisfaction with the success achieved so far on the road to membership. In this way, the public is manipulated, which is not always able to follow all the official documents of the European Union. The media are the ones who should inform the public about what exactly is happening.
This is not the first time the mentioned portal has published texts that provoke anti-EU sentiment among the citizens.
