Hungarian foreign minister: Macedonia’s example shows dangers of outside interference in a country’s affairs

Budapest (MTI) – What the world is seeing in Macedonia right now is an example of the dangers posed by constant outside interference in a country’s internal affairs, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Valletta on Friday.

Szijjártó spoke to MTI about the ongoing protests in Skopje, which escalated on Thursday after protesters stormed the country’s Parliament and assaulted the leader of the Social Democrats.

Szijjártó said Macedonia used to have a stable government which had won five consecutive elections.

Macedonian foreign minsiter Nikola Poposki and Hungarian counterpart in Valletta, photo: Hungarian Foreign Ministry

“But over the past two to three years there have been gross interferences in Macedonia’s internal affairs,” the minister said. “Embassies representing countries thousands of kilometres away dictated the dates on which they wanted elections to be held, organisations linked to [US billionaire] George Soros organised anti-government operations and the minority parties took instructions from the government of a neighbouring country,” he added. All of this has led to instability, chaos and violence, he said.

Some one hundred people were injured in Thursday’s assault on Macedonia’s parliament, including MPs and journalists. The assault was triggered by the Social Democrats and their ethnic Albanian allies electing an Albanian as parliamentary speaker.

Photo: MTI/EPA/Georgi Licovski

Source: MTI