Mickoski warns of foreign services and paid protests, an analyst replies: without real discontent, there is no street

In Tirana anti-government protests have turned violent, France, Italy and Belgium are out on the streets, Belgrade votes today after months of protests, unions have marched in Bulgaria, and the discontent has reached Greece too. In his speech for 23 October, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski offered an explanation for why it could come here as well: intelligence services in the region that are constantly active, possible provocations and attempts to drag Macedonia into its neighbours' problems. The opposition, he suggested, could take part in such scenarios "for money and false promises of top jobs".

The first reply came from analyst Petar Arsovski, and it doesn't square with the government's line. "Services cannot directly start protests, especially of this size, there has to be some authentic discontent for something like that to appear," he says. No party, in Arsovski's view, has the strength to pull off protests this massive. The most the opposition can do is lend support later on.

The reason nobody wants to say out loud

The most important sentence in the whole debate is the one least quoted. The structural cause of the wave, Arsovski says, is that younger generations cannot reach the quality of life of older ones. "They exist in Macedonia too," he adds, it's just that the readiness to protest here is, for now, lower than in neighbouring countries. He doesn't expect a direct spillover, but he does expect sporadic discontent among the hardest-hit groups.

Others see it differently. Security expert Ljubomir Gjurchevski believes the economic crisis in Europe will spark protests in the Balkans too, "where we have the lowest wages", and that all of it can be used for destabilisation - Macedonia, he says, will be a target. Professor Filip Petrovski goes further still: for him the protests in Europe are a "well-synchronised agenda" of left-wing youth structures, with a climax announced for around 20 November.

Then there is Pavle Trajanov, the national coordinator for countering violent extremism and terrorism - in other words, a state official. He says Macedonia is calm, that the current government has been in office "two years and a few months" and that public support is "still huge". A state official measuring support for the government - that is an opinion, not a security analysis.

If young people can't live the way their parents did, no foreign intelligence service invented that. That's wages and one-way tickets abroad. Will the government treat it as a problem to solve, or as just another threat from outside?