At the regional MEF 2026 forum on climate and the energy transition, held in Skopje, the mayor of Bitola Toni Konjanovski said something rarely heard from a political podium: that the green transition is not only an economic process, but a deeply social one. "Green projects have long implementation periods, and political cycles are short," he said.

That sentence hits the core of the problem. A green future demands decisions whose fruit will be harvested by some other term in office - and which politician wants to spend today for credit his successor will collect? Konjanovski pointed out that the countries of the Western Balkans face the same challenge: how to decarbonise without enough funds from the Just Transition Fund.

He advocated for regional networks of municipalities, like the Alliance of Green Mayors, as platforms for solving problems together. And he pointed to a concrete detail: the jobs in thermal power plants and mines are above all a social, not merely an economic question. Behind every "transition" stands a family whose salary depends on coal.

That's the part most often left out of the pretty presentations about a green future. It's easy to applaud solar panels; it's harder to answer the miner who'll ask you where he'll be working in five years. Bitola, a town that lived off the REK Bitola power plant for decades, knows that question better than anyone. Whether the words from the forum will become a plan - that's what the mining family will be waiting for, not another conference.