Comment    Nothing has changed   In the course of the pre-election campaign, when the political parties are making the final efforts to get another vote, the civil society organizations can note another government attempt to score on their account. Every year about fifteen million MKD of the overall budget of the Republic of Macedonia are aimed for financing civil society organizations and foundations. As opposed to the previous year when the Government passed that decision in November, this year it demonstrated an “incredible” efficiency by announcing the decision as early as on 20 June. Moreover this year it was signed by the Prime minister himself. It makes you wonder what on Earth is going on... suddenly we became a priority! However, after just one glance at the “winners” list one‘s thrill goes down, among other things, because of the reason for that efficiency. It was all just a “copy – paste” thing. All the things civil society organizations complained about in the past, the serious deviations from the criteria that the Government itself adopted in 2000 are repeating. So, one of those who was found on the “winners” list was the Macedonian federation of Trade unions, which is neither an association nor a foundation, that is, it is not registered according to the Law on civil society organizations and foundations. The amount of money it was granted (2 000 000 MKD) is much higher than the amounts aimed for the civil society organizations they are expected to do miracles with, that is 20 000 MKD to achieve the influence demanded by the criteria on national level, let alone the transparency of most of the selected, which is also one of those criteria. Financial assets from the national budget were granted to several organizations of trivial character. I wonder what kind of impact they would have on national level. Eventually we are left with the impression that nothing has changed, though the “caravan” set off earlier this time. Nice try, but...   Suncica Sazdovska