Prime minister Hristijan Mickoski said in Berovo that in two years the government has "created" 17,000 new jobs, and that the data centres will be built regardless of the resistance. "Absolutely not," he answered when asked whether they would drop the idea.

Both claims are worth examining separately, because they are two different kinds of statement - one is a number, the other is a political decision.

17,000 jobs, but whose

Mickoski cited State Statistical Office data: between the third quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2026 the number of employed rose from around 691,000 to 708,000 people. That is a difference of roughly 17,000. Most of the new hiring, he says, is in industry.

The number is accurate and verifiable. What is a political assessment rather than a statistic is the verb. A change in the number of employed shows the movement of the labour market - it does not automatically mean every new job was directly created by a specific government measure. The difference between "17,000 jobs opened up" and "we opened 17,000 jobs" carries the entire political weight of the sentence.

It is worth adding what the statistics from that same office showed for the same quarter: 101,022 people work informally, which is more than all the officially unemployed. That does not cancel out the 17,000, but it places it in a context no announcement from Berovo mentioned.

Data centres: "the future of humanity"

On the data centres Mickoski was blunt. They will be built in line with the National Strategy, he said, "because that is the future of humanity". As an argument he cited France with 68 billion euros of investment in data centres, adding that US GDP rests on artificial intelligence and that without it they would be in recession.

He also announced that five or six companies have already shown interest, and that as long as this government is in place, the idea will not be dropped.

The plan has a state component too: a primary national data centre linking state institutions, with the existing capacity in Prilep as the secondary, or recovery, centre. A national cloud system for data backups is also envisaged. This is not purely a domestic idea - the European Commission's assessment of Macedonia's Reform Agenda foresees examining exactly this kind of centralised government digital infrastructure.

Pehchevo said no, the prime minister says private initiative

A few days ago the councillors of Pehchevo municipality unanimously rejected the idea of data centres on their territory. Mickoski described that as a private initiative and did not want to go into detail.

From SDSM the message is different: "Macedonia does not have a stable energy system for Mickoski to be promising state resources in advance without the public knowing what it will cost and who will pay the bill," they say, adding that they have nothing against investments that bring development and new technologies, but that these must be in Macedonia's interest.

That is a question with a precise shape and no answer so far. A data centre consumes electricity and water in quantities planned in advance, not discovered after construction. How many megawatts, how many cubic metres, at what tariff, and on whose land - those are four numbers. Not one of them appeared in the statement from Berovo.

A strategy can be correct and still go unanswered. The difference is made by whether the numbers come out before the first contract is signed - or after Pehchevo gets a neighbour.