Minister Darmanović in Sofia: Montenegro is example for entire Western Balkans

Minister of Foreign Affairs Srđan Darmanović met today with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria Ekatarina Zaharieva, during his official visit to Sofia.

Minister Darmanović praised the continuity of political dialogue at the highest level and thanked for the continuous political and expert support of Bulgaria to Montenegro's reform and integration path.

"Bulgaria is one of the most significant friends and partners who strongly advocates for the European perspective of the Western Balkans and is consistently promoting the EU's position that the process remains fully based on individual merit, which we highly appreciate," Darmanović said.

Summing up the current results of the Bulgarian EU presidency, which, as he assessed, resulted in the adoption of the Strategy for the Western Balkans, Minister Darmanović said that despite the unfavourable European and global context in which the presidency takes place, the results are already visible and that the European perspective of the Western Balkans significantly strengthened during the relatively short three-month period.

DPM Zaharieva praised the excellent results achieved by Montenegro in the negotiating process, pointing out that Montenegro is a successful example of enlargement policy. She reiterated that Bulgaria, as it has so far, will continue to strongly support Montenegro.

The two officials agreed that there is room for improvement of cooperation between the two countries in the field of economy, tourism, internal affairs, justice, science and education, which will be the priority of bilateral activities in the forthcoming period.

Minister Darmanović met today with President of the Republic of Bulgaria Rumen Radev. Radev reiterated that Bulgaria supports enlargement policy based on the individual achievements of each country, and praised the achievements Montenegro made on its European path. He added that Montenegro, by implementing reforms in order to achieve a better future for itself and its neighbours, is a good example for the entire Western Balkans. In the context of further bilateral and regional cooperation, he stressed that besides joint infrastructure projects, special attention should be paid to strengthening human capacity as the most important resource of each society.

Minister Darmanović expressed the expectation that Montenegro and other Western Balkan countries would also use other priorities of the Bulgarian presidency in order to use cohesion policy, competitiveness and better infrastructure links to speed up the European integration of the region.