Introduction

North Macedonia has a unique and complicated relationship with the EU in comparison to other Western Balkans countries. This relationship presents a vulnerability that can be exploited by a host of actors, domestic and foreign, intent on undermining the EU. This mainly relates to the country’s ethnic composition, its fraught relationship with neighbouring Greece and Bulgaria, and the resulting long delay on its accession trajectory which has exposed the EU itself to criticism.

North Macedonia has been an EU candidate country since 2005 and for years was stuck in the position of candidacy approval without entering the process of accession negotiations. However, in 2020 – two years after an agreement with Greece saw the country’s constitutional name change to the Republic of North Macedonia – the country became a NATO member and received an invitation to open negotiations with the EU. For almost two years Bulgaria blocked the first Inter-Governmental conference and the initiation of negotiations by insisting that North Macedonia had failed to adhere to its bilateral treaties on “good neighbourly relations”. This treaty includes the constitutional recognition of the Bulgarian minority in North Macedonia, a population of more than 100,000 Bulgarian nationals (including Macedonians with dual citizenship).

In June 2022, the EU bypassed the Bulgarian veto, but negotiations are currently frozen because there has been no qualified majority in the Assembly of North Macedonia in support of a vote recognising Bulgarians under the Constitution. As a result, anti-EU rhetoric within North Macedonia often refers to the EU negotiating framework as the “Bulgarian framework” or “the French Proposal”. Even mainstream civil society organizations and academics in North Macedonia have vehemently opposed accepting the invitation to open negotiations with the EU, echoing the concerns of pro-Kremlin voices that it will undermine Macedonian identity. There is a direct comparison to be made with Albania’s accession process as these two countries were treated as a package until October 2024.

As part of this study, that I initially did for ISD (The Institute for Strategic Dialogue) sought to understand the impact of the EU accession process has had on disinformation and information operations in North Macedonia. The data analyzed indicates a widespread misperception that the EU is forcing North Macedonia to compromise its national history and identity through the implementation of the treaty as part of its accession process. Discussed often in domestic media outlets, this viewpoint also extends to political leaders. The former Prime Minister of North Macedonia and President of the Social-Democratic Political Party (SDSM), Dimitar Kovachevski, stated in an X post in June 2022 that drew 322 likes that “the French proposal is currently unacceptable to me…my people must be respected.”

In the case of domestic actors in North Macedonia, the analysis found that opposition to negotiations with the EU is not restricted to fringe parties and political actors. Other influential entities included the ruling VMRO-DPMNE– a centre right party with close ties with Hungary’s ruling party Fidesz – as well as institutions such as the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the oldest and most reputable newspaper, Nova Makedonija. At the same time, many historically pro-EU NGOs and think-tanks in the country have also become increasingly vocal over the past seven-to-eight years in questioning the utility of joining the union. This phenomenon is discussed further below.

Though CSOs and the broader mainstream public previously embraced the Prespa Agreement that led to the country’s name change in February 2019, our analysis suggests that support has gradually eroded to reluctant acceptance. During the same period, there has been heightened involvement from these entities, via media appearances and activism, in opposing the negotiating framework adopted by the EU during the French presidency (“the French Proposal”).

The first wave of misinformation around the negotiating framework in June and July 2022 came from unexpected sources: the NGOs and think-tanks which were historically considered pro-EU. The data collected for this study, which spans four years, suggests these actors continue to play a central role in spreading the narrative that the negotiating framework attempts to ‘introduce history and language’ into North Macedonia and therefore attempts to weaken national identity. Influential figures in Skopje, including the head of the European Policy Institute, characterize the process of accession as a threat to Macedonian identity.

In the political sphere, the belief that the proposal would be devastating to Macedonian national identity has been promoted by the ruling VMRO-DPMNE. Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski compared the proposal, which would include Bulgarians into the preambula of the constitution as a recognized ethnic community, to the occupation of the region by Axis-aligned Bulgaria during WWII. The left-wing Levica party has voiced similar views, describing the proposal as an “attempt to Bulgarianise the Constitution”. The widespread nature of this mainstreamed argument leaves North Macedonia (and the EU more broadly) vulnerable to foreign interference efforts from those invested in destabilizing support for the union.

According to recent polls, national support for EU accession fell more than 30% since the name change of the country, and has fallen further since the Bulgarian veto. The view that the EU framework is an insidious plan to “efface Macedonian identity and replace it with a Bulgarian one” has been propagated by the mainstream centre right and left, media outlets, and by NGOs with a long history of being supported by EU and US funds. This confusing and atypical situation suggests that misinformation and disinformation can morph to a degree that it alters the popular consensus.

As this analysis highlights, this decline in support for the EU is likely due to two key factors. The first, a relentless campaign by domestic and foreign actors to demonstrate how “the imposed” change of the country’s name (a term used by the winning party in the 2024 parliamentary elections) has been traumatic to the nation. The second, the dispute with Bulgaria and its solution in the form of the ‘French Proposal’, which are treated as a catalyst for the spread of misinformation about the EU. In this absence of trust in Western institutions, Russia is presented as a potential protective force for Macedonian identity and nationalist policies.

Methodology

Considering the complexity of the context, and the intertwining of overt anti-EU and pro-Kremlin actors with those who were perceived as established pro-Europeans and pro-Western, this study used both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Two complimentary datasets were produced by a combination of tools, including Brandwatch, CrowdTangle and INspectre. These captured a range of social media data across platforms in terms of both actors and content.

Keyword/content analysis

To produce these datasets, an initial 254 keywords were used for capturing content, which included actors, hashtags and tropes (rhetorical turns of phrases that include the keywords from the list).

Actor-based analysis

ISD’s actor-based approach to data collection leveraged existing knowledge of theMacedonian information ecosystem and a study published in May 2023, which analysed the views of the most influential CSOs and media in the country. This study, and others performed by regional experts, emphasise the importance of actors that are not openly pro-Russian or have the reputation of being pro-Western but of those that have become staunch critics of the country’s EU accession process in recent years. For the purposes of this study, openly pro-Kremlin actors were also included to allow for a comparative analysis of their discourse.

Qualitative analysis of both social media and conventional media sources identified the following narratives:

1. Claims that negotiations have not yet begun.

2. Claims that North Macedonia should be looking for alternatives to the EU accession, primarily arguing that negotiations will lead to a dead-end or the loss of Macedonian national identity.

3. Claims that that the proposed EU negotiating framework should not be accepted or explicitly rejected.

4. Claims that negotiations should be paused or frozen unless the framework is changed.

5. Claims that the conditions laid out for accession after 2020 have been devised to delay the process.

Analysis

In previous studies, high levels of anti-EU discourse were found in the periods of June 2022 to September 2022, and from spring to September 2023. In those periods, arguments about accession to the EU from EU- and USAID-funded organizations were found to overlap fully with those of the VMRO-DPMNE.

While the analysis for this study focused on openly pro-Russian or openly anti-EU actors around the election period of April-May 2024, quantitative research covers the entire period of 2020-2024. This allows for the identification of false and misleading narratives that arose in the aftermath of the country name change which effectively laid the groundwork for greater disillusionment with the EU. As such, it acted as the catalyst to distrust and disinformation surrounding admission to NATO and EU accession negotiations. A key finding from this research is that since these negotiations began, there has been an almost complete overlap between pro-Russian discourse and Russian criticism of the EU itself (including its treatment of North Macedonia).

As explored in greater depth below, the main narrative is that the negotiating framework or “French Proposal” includes ‘invisible traps’ which will undermine Macedonian identity. This leads to the argument that North Macedonia should freeze EU accession negotiations indefinitely. Similar arguments were found from both ‘pro-Western’ experts and media, and from openly pro-Russian actors. The only difference between these arguments is that openly pro-Russian actors also push for North Macedonia to leave NATO, apply for BRICS membership, or be fully ‘sovereign’ and unaligned with any major geopolitical power. Notably, typically pro-EU think tanks including the European Policy Institute (EPI) and Institute for Democracy Societas Civilis – Skopje (IDSCS) argued that that “full sovereignty and geopolitical non-alignment” compares to Yugoslavia’s membership in the League of Non-Aligned Countries. Influential actors such as the former Prime Minister of North Macedonia also argue that the Open Society Initiative “Open Balkans” should replace the EU accession.

Confluence of actors spreading Euroscepticism

The data collected revealed a confluence of actors engaged in spreading misinformation about “the French Proposal”. The ecosystem of these actors includes the Macedonian right-wing mainstream, civil society groups and NGOs, the openly pro-Russian radical right, and the radical left. The tight intertwining between pro-Russian and/or anti-EU sentiments with those that still want to accede to the EU and subscribe to some of its values is specific to the situation in North Macedonia. This appears to reflect a bipartisan dissatisfaction with the EU negotiating framework. Corroborating the findings of the 2024 IRI poll on attitudes towards Russia and the EU, the qualitative and quantitative research conducted for this study reaffirms that Eurosceptic sentiment is embedded across political divides. As a result, mainstream actors and media outlets that are not habitually perceived as pro-Russian or anti-EU have at times become platforms for Euroscepticism and implicit (or even explicit) pro-Kremlin viewpoints.

Misinformation about the accession process

As described above, the analysts observed pervasive sentiment across the political spectrum that the EU negotiating framework is designed to erase Macedonian identity in favour of redefining it as Bulgarian. This conspiracy theory is shared by mainstream actors who have actively rebranded the accession process as ‘Bulgarisation’ or ‘Bulgarianisation’, instead of Europeanisation.

Qualitative analysis surfaced the following mis- and disinformation narratives featured in Eurosceptic discussions:

• ‘Negotiations with the EU have not started’ because of conditions concerning the recognition of the Bulgarian minority in the Constitution

• ‘Negotiations are not real’, despite clear statements from EU and government officials to the contrary

• ‘Bulgaria is vetoing negotiations’, despite the veto being lifted precisely through the adoption of the negotiation framework

• ‘The French Proposal’ lifts the Bulgarian veto but is not a real EU negotiating framework

• ‘The EU/French always promise and never deliver’, on account of North Macedonia having been an EU candidate since March 2005

Conclusion

North Macedonia presents an unusual situation in which traditionally pro-European voices as well as pro-Russian voices have largely moved towards the same arguments as a result of controversy around the EU accession process. The new government, led by VMRO-DPMNE, has committed to not recognising the Bulgarian minority, to ignore the 2018 Prespa Agreement with Greece by calling the country ‘Macedonia’ (instead of North Macedonia), and to pause the accession process indefinitely until the negotiation framework or ‘French Proposal’ has been changed. As this analysis finds, this may leave North Macedonia vulnerable to influence efforts from Russia and other actors interested in the destabilisation of the EU.

Katerina (Katarina) Kolozova, PhD. is the director of the Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje and a professor of philosophy, epistemology and gender studies at ISSHS and also at the University American College, Skopje and a visiting professor at Arizona State University-Center for Philosophical Technologies. She is also visiting professor at several universities in Southeastern Europe, most notably at the Department of Political Studies of FMK-Belgrade. In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley, under peer supervision of prof. Judith Butler. Katerina Kolozova was a Columbia University NY-SIPA Visiting Scholar at its Paris Global Centre in 2019 working on issues of authoritarianism and feminism in Europe.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is dedicated to safeguarding democracy and human rights by reversing the rising global tide of polarisation, extremism and authoritarianism.