Daylight saving time in Macedonia ends on October 28. As Macedonians dial clocks an hour back, the country is launching a process to adopt a proposed bill of the EU on scraping daylight saving time. Macedonia should align its national legislation and define the manner in which the EU directive will be transposed.
The proposal of the Bureau of Metrology will be sent to the government for consideration, says the Ministry of Economy.
"The new draft-directive on lifting summertime arrangements, which hasn't been yet issued in the official gazette of the EC and the EU Parliament, states that the member states should transpose it by 1 April 2019 and propose a standard time, which will be applied at national level. The Bureau of Metrology is following any developments as regards the process of adopting the directive scraping summertime arrangements. After it is adopted, Macedonia will align its national legislation and define a manner to transpose the directive," the Bureau says.
In September, the European Commission decided to scrap the twice-yearly seasonal clock change across the bloc from October 2019, leaving member states to decide by April whether they will stick permanently to summer or winter time.
The move came after complaints about the negative consequences of clock change in an array of spheres, including public health, agriculture, traffic safety, etc. An opinion poll showed that 84 percent, 4.6 million Europeans, don't want to change their clocks.
Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland have already said they will abolish daylight saving time.
Western European countries introduced daylight saving time in 1970 saying it prolonged daylight, helped save power consumption, increased productivity, etc. It was also used during the world wars as a way to save energy.
Macedonia introduced seasonal time switches in 1996.
