The electoral code has become a battlefield again - but this time the fight is waged through press releases, not arguments. The ruling VMRO-DPMNE accuses the opposition SDSM and Levica of having an agreed strategy to block the new code, claiming their positions are "synchronized" and that "whatever Venko Zaev says today, Dimitar Apasiev says the next day."

The bone of contention is the voting rights of Macedonians living abroad. The government claims the opposition wants to block easier access for those abroad to their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. "Their common goal is to prevent expanding the democratic right to vote for our citizens abroad, and to create new obstacles in the electoral process," reads the VMRO-DPMNE statement.

SDSM fired back immediately with a mirror accusation: for Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski and his party, electoral reform is not the priority - creating conditions to manipulate votes from abroad is. So both sides accuse each other of the same thing - that the other wants to bend the rules in its favor. And the citizen reading along is left to guess for themselves who to believe.

This is a familiar Balkan performance: every reform that changes electoral rules automatically turns into a reckoning over who gains how many votes. Instead of a debate on how best to let hundreds of thousands of Macedonians abroad cast their ballots, we get a contest in press releases. The question neither side answers clearly is simpler: why, after so many years, do we still not have a code everyone accepts as fair? When electoral rules are written as a weapon rather than a framework, the loser is the one who's supposed to vote.