The Council of the Čair municipality has decided to name two streets in the municipality after fighters of the NLA - "Commander Teli" and after Zekirija Hasani. The decision was passed unanimously, but with one key and contentious detail: without a Badinter majority, that is, without the required consent of the representatives of the Macedonian community on the council.

That very "without Badinter" is the heart of the problem. The Badinter majority exists to prevent one community from unilaterally imposing decisions of a sensitive ethnic nature on another - it is one of the foundations of the Ohrid Agreement. When that protection is bypassed, it's not just about two nameplates on streets, but about a breach of the very mechanism that was supposed to keep interethnic relations under control.

The timing is hardly accidental. Naming streets after NLA fighters, at a moment when tensions are smouldering anyway, reopens the wounds of 2001. Every such decision carries a message, and a message sent by bypassing agreed rules rarely calms things - more often it provokes.

Reactions from political leaders and parties are expected, and the question hanging in the air is a familiar and unsettling one: if one side can bypass the rules today over names on streets, what stops any side tomorrow from doing the same for something far more serious? Institutions that allow the rules to be broken "just this once" usually discover that "this once" quickly becomes every time.