VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski said that the call to boycott the census led to a significant reduction in the share of ethnic Macedonians as part of the population. The boycott was pushed mainly by the populist Levica party, which pointed to the decision to count emigrants and to allow census taking by proxy, with unreliable documents, as the main reasons why they objected to the process.

The most important category we see are these 7.2 percent of all registered citizens who did not participate in the census and did not give their data for several key categories – ethnic identity, religion and language. They are in the category of “undetermined”. That is why we consider this statistical operation as incomplete. We have 132,000 citizens whose identity was not registered, but it is clear, given the municipalities where they live, that 90 percent of them are ethnic Macedonians. I understand their sentiments, I respect their decision not to participate in the census. If they did, the result would have been different and the proportion of nationalities would have been different, Mickoski said.

The missing 132,000 residents were added to the registries using comparisons of data obtained from the tax, healthcare, education and other authorities, which determined that these citizens are active in Macedonia, but boycotted the census.