In a letter addressed to diplomatic representatives in Macedonia, VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski urges that the census is postponed for September and the municipal elections are held in early October. Mickoski, who is himself recovering from a bad Covid-19 infection, says that the risks of holding a census in April, as Zoran Zaev intends, before the any meaningful inoculation has taken place, are far too great.
The struggle with the difficult epidemic and the lack of vaccines, in combination with a census conducted on the ground, will create serious public health risks. I don’t doubt that we need a credible census, but this is not the time. We need to be focused on confronting the healthcare challenges we now face. Once the healthcare crisis is overcome, we can refocus on the census, Mickoski said.
Macedonia is facing a strong new wave in the pandemic, and the Zaev regime has utterly failed to provide vaccines – with the main hoped for delivery from China apparently now canceled after Zaev and his Healthcare Minister Venko Filipce tried to use a shell company in Hong Kong to make the purchase.
Mickoski has accused Zaev of adopting the census law without broad support across the political spectrum. Besides the fact it is being conducted in the midst of a deadly epidemic, Mickoski’s VMRO-DPMNE party also protested the lack of anti-fraud measures in the census and Zaev’s intent to count emigrants as residents. This is being done on request of the Albanian parties, who fear that the Albanian share of population will drop below 25 or even 20 percent if the diaspora is not included.
In a polarized society like ours, the census needs to be conducted with full political consensus. The lack of consensus brought us to a dead-end street and the only solution is to postpone the census, Mickoski said.
He adds that the focus by September should be on obtaining sufficient quantities of vaccines to inoculate the population, including the census takers, and then organize a proper census.
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