SDSM leader Venko Filipce appeared on Sitel's "Topic of the Day" and delivered the sentence the autumn will revolve around: "We are not the same as Hristijan Mickoski's organised criminal group. On the contrary, we are diametrically opposed."

Set against it is his image of the government: "We want an advanced country in which everyone can see a future, and we do not look at the state the way they look at it - as loot."

A Master Plan in September, covering two years

Filipce announced that during September SDSM will publish its Master Plan for Macedonia - a document of five to six points in which, as he put it, citizens will know what will happen over the next two years if they give the party their trust. He listed the priorities: living standards, wages, pensions, school and student allowances.

And then came the contrast obviously designed to stay in your head: "and not buying a new plane the way Hristijan Mickoski wants to".

A party that has a ready team, a ready programme and a ready programme platform, but which will publish that programme only in September. If all of it is ready, the question of why it is waiting is itself political.

Two billion euros as an argument

Filipce returned to his government's term during covid and the energy crisis. According to him, several packages of measures then provided around two billion euros of support to citizens and companies, preserved tens of thousands of jobs, and subsidised electricity for more than 600,000 families.

"People on social assistance, pensioners, young people were getting packages, measures. That is how you manage a crisis. What do we have now? Which category of citizens is protected? Not one," he said.

He also raised the minimum wage: during that period it was increased three times, and now, he says, the prime minister will not raise it to 600 euros while simultaneously claiming we are the third-strongest economy in Europe. "So, is he telling the truth? Obviously he is not."

Five years under a label

The most personal part of the interview came around the closing of the pre-trial investigation into the modular hospitals without any indictments. Filipce said he had expected such an outcome because he knows how he worked, but accused the then opposition of playing with the feelings of the victims' relatives.

"I am deeply sorry for the people who died there, for the families. I genuinely sympathise, I still feel it today," he said, adding that a campaign was devised with the prime minister's chief PR adviser in which he was called a murderer, Doctor Mengele, Doctor Death. "And that went on for five years."

He demanded an apology to the families of the victims. The question neither side wants to ask out loud is whether a legal decision that there will be no indictments restores those families' trust - or merely moves the argument from the courtroom to the studio.

What remains is a line-up of forces heading into an autumn where everyone talks about elections and nobody calls them. One side promises a plan, the other defends a record. Citizens, meanwhile, are reading their own payslips - and the latest statistics show June's average net wage was 1,163 denars lower than May's.