Four hours and two long breaks. That's how long it took the Council of the Tetovo municipality just to adopt the agenda - not to decide anything, only to agree on what to discuss. And at the end of that marathon session, instead of a decision, there were empty chairs: the DUI councillors walked out of the hall, even though their proposal had actually been accepted.

The trigger is eighteen years old, but alive again: the names of 67 streets in Tetovo. On 17 June the Constitutional Court struck down a 2007 decision to rename the streets, adopted when the mayor was from DUI, ruling that the municipality had not secured the government's consent at the time. Legally, the story went back to square one. Politically, it turned into a battlefield.

When procedure matters more than the name

Opposition councillors asked for the street question to be the first item on the agenda. The majority accepted the proposal but placed it as the last item, after the 25 already scheduled. A break was requested twice, the demand for the „first item" was refused twice, and then - a walkout with banners in hand. „We are leaving the session because I don't know how many times we asked for our item to be first," said the coordinator of the DUI councillors' group, Berat Murati.

On the other side, „Vredi" and deputy mayor Albi Ćamili turned the story on its head. According to them, the whole drama was manufactured to overshadow something else - the start of works on the Tetovo-Prizren road and other projects of the local government. „We saw strange behaviour from the DUI councillors, who, in an attempt to stage political theatre, proposed a re-vote on the street names. After their demand was accepted on our side, they left the session," Ćamili said.

Working towards early elections

What makes this dispute more than an ordinary quarrel is the risk that hung over it. Voting again on a decision the Constitutional Court had already struck down - without the consent that was missing in 2007 - could have meant dissolving the Council itself. In other words, through a fight over name plates, Tetovo nearly found itself heading into early local elections. To avoid that, a councillor from „Better for Tetovo" proposed withdrawing the contentious item altogether and returning it to the municipal committee.

Before the session, DUI organised two protests, calling the Constitutional Court's decision an attack on identity, while „Vredi" accused them of manufacturing artificial tensions. The Association of Fighters from the National Liberation War also weighed in at the session, sharply condemning the proposal to change the names. Everyone told their own story, everyone came out a victim - and the question stayed unresolved, sent back to a committee that will convene tomorrow.

One simplest question remains, one rarely asked amid the banners and the interrupted sessions: how much do the people of Tetovo actually care what their streets are called, as opposed to whether they'll be paved at all? When an institution spends four hours on an agenda and zero minutes on a solution, then the names aren't the problem. The problem is that the theatre became more important than the work.