Mickoski on Electricity: Five Hedges in a Single Sentence, and Winter Is Coming Regardless of the Methodology

"On electricity we are making a methodology to try, if nothing else, at least to keep the same price, and why not, to try to make it cheaper too," Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said in Stip, answering a reporter's question.

Read that sentence again and count the conditions in it. We are making a methodology. To try. If nothing else. At least to keep. And why not, to try as well. That is not a pricing decision - it is an announcement that work is under way on something that might lead to something.

None of it is a lie. The government really is preparing a new methodology for calculating the price of electricity, the final model is not yet known, and the prime minister claims otherwise nowhere. The problem is that a statement like this, right before winter, functions as a promise while being phrased so that it cannot be broken.

What was said and what was not

It was said that since this government took office there has been no increase in the electricity price for households. It was said that the situation is stable and that the winter will be stable. It was said that all of this is despite "the greatest energy crisis humanity remembers", as he described the war in the Gulf.

It was not said when the new methodology will be ready. It was not said what exactly will change in it. It was not said under what conditions the price could fall, or by how much. Nor was it said what happens if the calculations do not allow it.

For a household about to open its first big heating-season bill in November, the difference between "it will not go up" and "we are making a methodology with which we will try to stop it going up" is the difference between planning and hoping.

The methodology is where the answer lives

The electricity price for households is not set by a statement but by a regulatory calculation - which is exactly why the announcement of a new methodology is more interesting than the sentence about the price. If the model changes, so does the way costs are distributed: how much the household carries, how much other consumers carry, how much the state carries through generation.

That is a question that deserves public debate before it is decided, not a press release after it has been. Until then, all there is is one sentence with five hedges, delivered on a visit to Stip - and one winter that is coming regardless of when the methodology is ready.