Macedonian PM Defends his Deputy

“Since his appointment as far as I can tell he has been doing his job well and we have noticed improvement in his sector,” Gruevski said in an interview with the local Sitel TV.

He praised Naumovski’s work but added that “everyone is allowed to make little mistakes”.

On Friday Macedonia’s opposition Liberal Democrats, LDP, and New Democracy Party, ND, tabled a no-confidence motion against Naumovski.

“We've decided to formally challenge the performance of Deputy Prime Minister Naumovski. In our view, Naumovski should step down because he is not suitable for the job,” Flora Kadriu, a legislator from the New Democracy Party, told media on Friday.

Naumovski has been in office for the past 10 months.

The opposition blamed him for the country's setbacks in efforts to meet the political criteria for EU membership, restrictions on the work of the national Secretariat for European Affairs, setbacks in the harmonization of national legislation with the EU laws, and failure to implement laws related to the country's EU agenda which have already been adopted.

He has also been blamed for writing an internal memo restricting the Secretariat of European Affairs staff communication with the European Commission Delegation in Skopje.

“Naumovski reassured me that he has not written such a document,” PM Gruevski said in the interview, noting that the deputy prime minister would probably elaborate further on this during the parliament discussion.

Last autumn Macedonia received a recommendation from the European Commission to start its EU accession talks, an accomplishment that is usually attributed to Naumovski’s predecessor, Ivica Bocevski, and others before him.

Although the recommendation was positive, in December Macedonia failed to get the desired date for the start of talks due to the blockade by Greece over the unresolved bilateral name spat. Since then the opposition has been blaming Naumovski for harming the country’s EU integration bid.

The no-confidence motion against Naumovski is unlikely to pass in the parliament as Gruevski's main ruling VMRO DPMNE party and its coalition partners hold the vast majority of seats.