Petrol is up 4.5 denars a litre, diesel 6.5. That is the fact. Everything else that happened yesterday is politics.

SDSM announced that the government had taken neither timely nor current action to protect living standards - no excise cut, no temporary measure. The party says the price rise will feed directly into the cost of basic goods, into farmers' expenses, into transport and into the lives of people who commute to work every day. They close the message with a line about citizens feeling the consequences „at the till, at the pump and in an empty wallet”.

VMRO-DPMNE replied that the cause is global - disrupted trade and energy flows, the war in Ukraine, sanctions, blockades of the corridors for oil, gas and food. And it added: „SDS seems to be living on Halkidiki with no access to media or the internet. If there's no global crisis now, when was there one?”

Both claims can be true at the same time

This is the trap the debate falls into every single time. Is the price of oil set on the world market? Yes. Does the government have an instrument to soften the blow at the pump? Also yes - excise duty is a domestic decision, taken in Skopje, not in Rotterdam.

So the question is not „who is to blame for the world price”. The question is whether an excise cut was considered and, if it was rejected, why. That takes one sentence with a number in it. What we got instead was a comparison with a holiday on Halkidiki.

What is missing from both statements

SDSM demands measures, but does not say which measure, worth how many denars, or what it would cost the budget. VMRO-DPMNE says the crisis is global, but does not explain why neighbouring countries facing the same global crisis have different excise models. Neither side published a calculation.

Instead, the duel ended in personal score-settling. The governing party said SDSM does not feel the crisis because „the safes are full, business is booming and they haven't a care”. The opposition shot back that the real statistics are not in government reports but at the pumps and the tills.

Who is standing at the pump

While this exchange goes on, six and a half denars a litre of diesel are already in force. For a lorry driver with a 300-litre tank that is nearly 2,000 denars more per fill-up. For a farmer in harvest season, in a year when buy-up prices are lower than last year, it is a direct cut to the margin.

The two biggest parties held their positions. Neither mentioned a date by which it would produce a calculation. The price, unlike the press releases, applies from today.