The Parliament adopted its own-initiative report on North Macedonia's 2025 Commission progress report by 411 votes to 120 against, with 120 abstentions. The winning coalition was led by EPP ( 151 for), S&D ( 113 for), and Renew ( 68 for), with the Greens/EFA unanimous in support; PfE voted predominantly against ( 70 against), ECR split unevenly with most abstaining, and ESN voted against. As a non-legislative own-initiative resolution, the text carries no direct legal force, but it constitutes Parliament's formal political position on North Macedonia's accession trajectory and is intended to press the Commission and Council to hold the candidate country to strict conditionality — and to hold the process itself to fair and credible standards. The adopted text retains a substantive call for qualified majority voting in interim enlargement steps, reaffirms that bilateral disputes must not be instrumentalised in the accession process, and adds conditions on legislative compliance with Venice Commission standards and anti-racism recommendations. The central cleavage was not over whether to be critical of North Macedonia's progress — the mainstream (EPP, S&D, Renew) wrote a substantial set of critical and conditional amendments into the text — but over how far to go and on which dimensions. ECR and ESN sought to push further on specific points, including adding an externally benchmarked urgency critique to paragraph 2 (Am 7, rejected) and referencing the 2022 negotiating framework in the recitals (Am 5, rejected by a wide margin). A version of new recital Ja, anchoring future Bulgaria–North Macedonia relations in shared memory and education, passed with support from S&D, ECR, PfE, and ESN — but against EPP and Renew. The two competing versions of an amendment on the antisemitic arson attack in Skopje illustrated the session's internal tensions: a version backed by Renew, ECR, ESN, and PfE passed, while a broadly similar rival version backed mainly by ECR, ESN, and PfE fell when EPP and Renew voted against. Multiple EPP delegations — including those from Poland, Germany, Greece, France, Croatia, and Sweden — registered the highest deviation rates from their group's majority positions, reflecting divergent national interests on questions touching on Bulgaria's conditions and the bilateral dispute framework.
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