When citizens' trust in the judiciary sits at just two percent, that is not a margin of error - it is a diagnosis. President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova says the answer lies in serious reform: sanctions, accountability, and justice that applies to those at the very top, not just to ordinary citizens.

Her prescription comes down to two things that get talked about endlessly here and acted on rarely: checks on where people's wealth came from, and clearing party politics out of how judges and prosecutors get appointed. In plain terms - a judge should be someone who knows the law, not someone with a connection inside a party, and an official should answer for assets they cannot explain. It sounds simple. The catch is that every government has promised exactly this for decades.

Siljanovska also points to the philosophy poisoning the system - the conviction that "everything can be bought" - and says it has to be defeated. That is also where the deepest skepticism lives, the kind every citizen is entitled to. Two percent trust did not fall out of the sky; it was built over years of cases that went unpunished, names that stayed protected, and verdicts that depended on who the defendant was.

So the question is not whether the president is right - she obviously is. The question is who will carry out the reforms she describes, when the very people meant to enact them have the least interest in seeing the system change. Judicial reform promised from a post with no executive power is a good diagnosis with no prescription in hand. And citizens have heard enough diagnoses already - they are waiting for the cure.