At the presentation of new municipal vehicles, prime minister Hristijan Mickoski used his speech to take stock of 26 months in office. The central figure he gave: around half a billion euros secured through government programmes for capital investment in the municipalities.

"One of the leading projects at the start of this government was decentralising funds from the state budget to the municipalities, and that way we managed to secure projects worth half a billion euros," Mickoski said.

He also announced that the next step is delivering electric buses to municipalities, to organise environmentally friendly public city transport, which according to him should start soon.

The rhetoric around the figure

The rest of the address was devoted to the previous government. Mickoski spoke of a "kneeling, collapsed and looted state" inherited 26 months ago from the SDSM and DUI government, of a ruined health system, of the pandemic period and of the tax policies of the previous administration.

"From a kneeling, collapsed and looted state that was our main challenge 26 months ago when we inherited it, today we can say that Macedonia is a better place to live," the prime minister said.

He listed completed and started projects too: expressways, motorway sections, railway sections, renovated hospitals.

The same speech contains one sentence rarely heard from a position of power: "I know it is not ideal, I know life is hard, and after all it was never easier." That sentence says more than all the rest - because it is the only one that does not need a comparison with somebody else in order to be true.

What decentralising money means

Half a billion euros redirected from the central budget to the municipalities is a real move with real consequences. But the figure on its own does not say whether the money was well spent - it only says it was transferred.

Which is why the check is not in the speech at a launch event, but in what will be visible on the ground: how many of those projects are finished, how many municipalities actually used the funds, and how many tenders ended up with the firms that keep appearing on the lists.

Mickoski announced the projects will continue and thanked the World Bank, the ministers and the mayors. The event was for municipal machinery, and the speech was a two-year balance sheet.

That is a format every government uses, ours and foreign ones alike. Except that the municipal machinery arrived out of unspent money from a different World Bank project, not from the half billion being talked about.