Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski presented the second-quarter economic indicators with a framing that says more about politics than about economics: these are, as he put it, bad news for "the opposition and those who pray and want this country to fail".

The numbers, though, exist regardless of who packages them how. They are worth a look.

What exactly was reduced

According to the prime minister, in the second quarter state debt fell by more than 40 million euros and public debt by more than 20 million euros. He claims the level of state debt is now the lowest since the coronavirus crisis.

Finance Ministry data give the same picture, but with the context usually left out at the podium. Public debt in the second quarter stands at 58.8 percent of gross domestic product, or 10,726 million euros. The reduction against the first quarter is 0.1 percentage points, in absolute terms 21 million euros. State debt on 30 June was 9,432 million euros, or 51.7 percent of GDP.

So the reduction is real - and it is tiny. One tenth of a percentage point per quarter. Compared with the end of 2024 the difference is 2.6 percentage points, and with the end of 2025, 0.6 points. That is a trend in the right direction, but it is not a turnaround.

Industrial production

Here the figure is more impressive: 6.5 percent growth in June against the same month last year. But the prime minister himself added the second number, which is more honest than the average politician manages - for the whole second quarter, growth is four percent.

The gap between 6.5 and 4 is not a detail. One number is a good month, the other is the quarterly trend. Which of the two a citizen remembers depends on which headline they read.

What 58.8 percent means

Finance Minister Gordana Dimitrieska-Kočoska framed the key point: managing debt around 60 percent of GDP means preventing it from crossing that threshold. That is the point. The debt is not collapsing - it is being held under control, close to a line many consider critical.

"The indicators of two years of hard work are slowly but surely becoming visible, the successes are coming and good times are ahead of us," Mickoski said.

Perhaps. A 0.1 percentage point reduction and one good month in industry are genuine numbers and deserve to be stated as such. But "good times are ahead of us" is a sentence every government in this country has uttered. The difference will not be shown by a second-quarter press release, but by the same indicator after four quarters - and by whether a citizen feels it in their own budget rather than only in a spreadsheet.