The deadline for a new Electoral Code has expired, and the government has a ready-made headline for the public: Macedonia lost around 4 million euros in European funds, and it is the opposition's fault. Except that, in the whole story about the lost millions, one number is quietly left out - the roughly 10 million euros of public money that the biggest parties will once again divide among themselves.

With the reform gone, the existing model of paid political advertising stays in force. That means the state will keep filling party budgets with our money - under the excuse that this is how democracy works. The Left party, which opened this question, argues that this is exactly what neither of the two biggest parties minds.

According to the party, in the final stretch of the talks VMRO-DPMNE pushed away the topic of a single electoral district - even though that was one of its own pre-election promises - and instead opened a new question about voting from abroad. SDSM, for its part, refused to attend a coordination meeting to align on a single electoral district. The result: no new Code, no single electoral district, no scrapping of payments for political advertising.

This is worth pausing on. The reform was sold as democratisation, and it fell at the very moment it was supposed to touch the two things that directly protect the advantage of the biggest parties - the six electoral districts and the state money for ads. A coincidence? Or was that precisely the point?

When the public is served lost European millions as the news of the day, it is easy to overlook that the same people mourning 4 million from the outside stay silent about 10 million from the inside. The question is not who lost the European money. The question is who it suited to have no reform - and who will pay those 10 million. The answer, as ever, is us.