Nikola Poposki

After formally accepting the resignation of long-standing opposition leader Nikola Gruevski on Sunday night, Macedonia's main opposition right-wing VMRO-DPMNE party is set to elect his successor from several possible contestants. The extraordinary congress is scheduled for December 22-23.

Austria's foreign minister says closing the so-called "Balkan route" to migrants seeking to reach central and northern Europe was the right move.

While organisations financed or perceived to be linked to US billionaire philanthropist George Soros are increasingly under attack in the Balkans, Open Society Foundations says it is honoured to finance those working to create better lives for people in the region.

As the election campaign in Macedonia draws to its end on Friday at midnight, ahead of  Sunday's vote, some of the politician's statements about the countr and its crisis stick out more than others.

1. Confiscation, not federalization:

If the Republic of Macedonia had not closed its borders with Greece to migrants, Schengen would have collapsed. At the same time, every single country would have had to introduce border controls, stated Macedonia Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki, reported Die Welt, cited by BGNES.

Foreign ministers of Western Balkan countries met on Wednesday in Durres, Albania, with EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn to discuss joint infrastructural projects financed by the EU.

The Durres meeting was the fourth such meeting of Western Balkan ministers in the so-called Berlin Process, a five-year process started in August 2014 marked by yearly summits.

The refugee crisis on the northern borders between Greece and FYROM is exposing the incompetence of the Greek government on the handling of the matter. The latest developments reveal a new twist on the 700 refugees that had crossed into the territory of FYROM from the Greek side Monday.

"Balkan refugee route is no more," Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar said on television late Tuesday, after his government wired Balkan capitals that it was closing the border to "irregular migrants".

Macedonia won't allow to be turned into a refugee camp, the country's Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki has stated, referring to the influx of asylum seekers transiting the Balkan country from Greece on their way to the EU.

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and his Macedonian counterpart, Nikola Poposki, agreed to work on rebuilding trust between the two countries at a meeting in Athens.

Poposki said Macedonia "has a strategy to have good relations with Greece" but added that when it comes to the dispute over Macedonia's name, the two countries remain separated by "mountains."