Is the neck the same as the neck? Is the glass half full or half empty? The minister for European integration engaged in similar linguistic and philosophical acrobatics Nemanja Starović, interpreting the announcement of the European Commission.
Namely, there have been rumors for a long time, and even the Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, was not very shy in her announcements, and then it happened - the European Commission (EC) froze about 1,5 billion euros which are intended for Serbia from the EU Growth Plan.
That's what the media wrote for the most part - she froze, so she stopped for a while. What is frozen can be thawed.
Or "stopped", as Marta Kos said. "For now, we have stopped all payments from Growth plan because Serbia has regressed in the field of justice, and until they fix it, they will not be able to get financial support from the EU."
Brussels waffles
In the official dictionary of the European Commission, among the famous Brussels diplomatic wafers, it sounds like this: "For now, we have put on hold the decisions that affect the payments to Serbia and that remains in force."
Photo: Aleksandar Barda/FoNetNot the best relations: EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos and Serbian Prime Minister Đuro Macut
It's not the neck, it's the neck. But Minister Starović now insists on the difference between the neck and the neck, who tells RTS that the EC has supposedly "officially confirmed" that there is no question of freezing Serbia's financial resources.
Or, according to Starović, "putting on hold" is not "freezing". In a bizarre performance, Starović also praised the EC, saying that their announcement was important in order to dispel numerous "half-information" that was circulating in the public.
"The EC clearly states that there is no question of any blocking of financial resources, which could be heard from numerous ominous birds in the previous days, but that what exists is a continuous assessment of the fulfillment of the criteria for the payment of financial resources, which has existed since the moment when the EU Growth Plan for the Western Balkans was established as a mechanism," added Starović.
He will do whatever it takes.
Despite these interpretive acrobatics, there is no money from Brussels and there will be none until the government fixes or rejects the set of so-called Mrdić's laws with which the judiciary in Serbia is even more subjugated.
On that front, everyone, from Starović to the President of the Assembly Ana Brnabić to the President Aleksandar Vučić, claims that they will do everything that was recommended by the Venice Commission and quickly, within a month.
And that commission had serious objections to Mrdić's laws, especially to the blundering of the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime, which is leading proceedings in the case of Nadstrešnica and the General Staff.
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