The welcome sign at the entrance to Skopje - the one with the photo collage and the caption „Dobre dojdovte vo Skopje / Welcome to Skopje" - is once again the subject of political dispute. This time not because of the five-legged horse that had earlier made the picture a punchline, but because of something missing: the Albanian language.

DUI accuses the City of Skopje of breaching, twice in a single day, its legal obligation to use the Albanian language. Skopje, they remind, is a bilingual city, and its institutions have a clear legal duty to use Albanian in official communication - yet the sign at the entrance stands only in Macedonian and in English.

But the opposition's main arrow points not at the city, but at one institution that, they say, ought to react and instead stays quiet: the Inspectorate for the Use of Languages. „This institution was formed precisely to establish violations and to impose measures. Years of work, staff and training went into its creation," DUI says - and it demands the immediate resignation of the director, a cadre of the Vlen party.

According to the opposition, the Inspectorate's silence directly emboldens the violators and turns the exclusion of the Albanian language into institutional practice. That's why, alongside the resignation, they also demand legal accountability for everyone who broke the Law on the Use of Languages.

Behind the party sparring sits a question that outlasts the daily statements. The Inspectorate exists, the law exists, the obligation exists - but if the institution set up to enforce the law goes silent when the law is broken most visibly, on the sign at the very entrance to the city, then what is it for? A sign can be changed in a day, the way the billboard with the horse was changed after the criticism. An institution that doesn't act is the heavier problem, and it isn't fixed with a new stamp.