While Bulgaria put forward a long list of demands from Macedonia, including having a given number of ethnic Bulgarians registered in the Macedonian census, its own standards fall far short in the protection fo minority rights.
Bulgaria is conducting a census at about the same time with Macedonia. In it, Macedonians are not allowed to declare their own identity and fall under the category “others”. Only Bulgarians, Turks and Roma are allowed to state their identity at the census, making it impossible to estimate the size of the Macedonian community in Bulgaria.
At the 1956 census, there were over 187,000 Macedonians in Bulgaria, largely in the Pirin Macedonia region. As Bulgarian policy toward the Macedonians changed after the fall of the Georgi Dimitrov regime and the elevation of Todor Zivkov in his place, this number fell dramatically, reflecting persecution. In 1992, 10,803 people stated their Macedonian identity in the census, 5,071 did so in 2001, and only 1,654 in 2011.
By contrast, Bulgaria demands that the Macedonian census reflects the fact that it issued over 120,000 dual citizenships to Macedonian citizens over the past two decades. Even though most of these applicants used the Bulgarian passport for easy access to the EU labour market and left the Balkans altogether, Bulgaria now insists that if the census in Macedonia does not reflect this number, it will be evidence of persecution of the Bulgarian minority.
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