The Albanian opposition coalition of the Alliance of Albanians and Alternative condemned the meeting between the leaders of VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM Hristijan Mickoski and Zoran Zaev today. Zaev and Mickoski made several decisions, mainly agreeing on the VMRO demand to postpone the census for September. But Albanian parties demand the process to continue, aware that with Zaev they will be able to count the sizable Albanian diaspora and add them to the list along with the actual residents.

The opposition Albanian parties focused their ire on Zaev’s Albanian coalition partner DUI.

DUI pretends to represent the Albanians in the Government but underestimated its votes and all Albanians. Zoran Zaev himself said that he merely notified DUI leader Ali Ahmeti over the phone that the census is being postponed. He did not even ask him for his opinion. A party that entered the Government cheating the citizens that it will secure an ethnic Albanian Prime Minister is now harming all Albanians and postponing the census, the coalition said. AA and Alternative also accused Mickoski and Zaev of trying to reduce the number of Albanians as share of the overall population in the census.

Zaev said that he will meet with these two parties in the coming days and will discuss their demand for a maximally liberal citizenship law that will allow ethnic Albanians from the region to claim Macedonian citizenship simply by producing witnesses who will declare that they lived in Macedonia prior to 1991.