When you announce an "invasion" and barely a hundred people turn up on the ground, the gap between the word and the number says it all. DUI announced a mass protest in Tetovo, and the march gathered - by estimates from the scene itself - around 100 to 150 citizens. For a party that has for decades presented itself as the voice of Albanians in Macedonia, that's a number that says more than any speech.

The trigger for the protest was the decision of the Constitutional Court, which struck down as unlawful the 2007 decision of the Tetovo Council to rename about a dozen streets. DUI claims this endangers the principles of the Ohrid Framework Agreement and the rights of the communities. The protest passed peacefully, without incidents - but also without the mass turnout that had been announced.

What this protest reveals isn't the dispute over street names, but the state of DUI itself. The party that for years was an unavoidable factor in every government now calls a protest and gets a hundred people. Is that a sign that voters have grown tired of the same faces promising to protect rights, while in the meantime they were part of every government that supposedly trampled those rights? The question hangs in the air over the half-empty square.

Renaming streets is a sensitive topic - symbols mean something, especially in a city like Tetovo. But when a party announces an "invasion" to hide that it can no longer gather a crowd, that isn't a fight for rights, but a fight for relevance. And relevance, unlike streets, doesn't come back with a protest. It's lost quietly, person by person, while the party still thinks the word "invasion" will fill the square.