Today we formally start the initiative with which we will submit the law to the Parliament Speaker, asking to nullify the census law which was adopted without consensus and without any respect for the health of citizens in the midst of the pandemic. Unfortunately the authorities have also failed to deal with it, and Macedonia is firmly nailed to the bottom or at the top according to the number of infections and deaths due to the incompetence of the government, VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski said at Wednesday’s press conference.

Mickoski said that ee are witnessing that a number of countries in the region such as our neighbor Bulgaria, our neighbor Serbia, then furthermore Croatia, Romania, Germany, taking care of the health of citizens decided to postpone their census for fall or spring 2022 or fall 2021.

Since the census in our country is impossible to take place in the fall 2021 due to the local elections and the campaign that will take place then, we call on the government to show reason, to take care of the health of the people and postpone the census for spring 2022. Nothing will change if the census is postponed for several months, instead of the one planned for April 2021, he said, adding that not even the census have been formed nor trained, which is practically impossible amid the pandemic.

He added that thousand of people’s lives will be at risk even more so that we do not have vaccines that would protect those people. The first vaccines that would eventually arrive in a modest amount in Macedonia are expected somewhere in early March.

We call for reason, if there is no reason to postpone the census for 2022. We urge the government and the authorities in the parliament to accept the proposal of the opposition for digital census, back in 2015 supported by the European Union, the European Commission, the Ministry of Information Society and Administration that there are conditions to prepare databases for conducting digital census, a project that was completed in 2018, 2019, Mickoski said.