A third of the citizens plan to move out of the country, according to the latest poll conducted by the Institute for Political Research – Skopje (IPIS) for Detektor.

According to her, 30% of the respondents are considering or have ever considered leaving Macedonia. 64.8% stated that they are not thinking about moving out. The data is worrying that among young people up to 30, and among citizens up to 40 years of age, the percentage of those who are thinking about emigrating is close to 50%.

The IPIS poll shows that 45.3% of young people under the age of 29 are thinking about moving out. In the age group from 30 to 39 years, 44.3% are considering or have ever considered leaving Macedonia. As the age of the respondents increases, this percentage decreases. 33.2% of citizens between 40 and 50 years are thinking about moving out. It is interesting that 28.1% of those who are between 50 and 59 years plan to leave Macedonia. Among citizens over 60 years of age, the interest in emigration expectedly drops to 9.8%.

Nearly two-thirds of citizens have someone close who has already moved abroad.

According to the poll, 60% of the respondents stated that they have someone close who has already moved abroad, while 37.8% said that they do not. Most of those who have close ones who have moved abroad live in the North-Eastern region.

There, 80% of the respondents have someone close who moved from Macedonia. In the southeast, 71.2% have someone close who has emigrated abroad. The smallest percentage of people who said they have close ones who moved from Macedonia live in Skopje.

More than half of the citizens still think that they have no chance to leave Macedonia. 54.5% of the citizens on a scale from 1 to 5 rated the probability of moving out of Macedonia with one. Only 10.2% are convinced that there is a very high chance of moving out of the country in the next 5 years. As expected, most of these citizens who are convinced that they will leave Macedonia in 5 years are young people under 30. Even 21.4% of them are convinced that they will leave Macedonia in 5 years.

More than half of the citizens say that 5 years ago they lived better than today. The poll shows that 52.6% of the respondents share this view. 33.7% do not feel a change, while only 6.6% say that they live better today than 5 years ago.

By region, in Pelagonija as many as 66.2% of the respondents said that they had a better life 5 years ago. The percentage of citizens who lived better 5 years ago is the lowest in the southeast.

Compared to the poll conducted by IPIS in 2019 for Detektor, the numbers differ greatly. 4 years ago, 33.5% of citizens stated that they lived better 5 years ago, which is significantly less than today’s 52.6%. The number of citizens who stated in 2019 that they currently live better than what they lived 5 years ago was 23.7%, which is 4 times less than today’s 6.6%.

The poll for the needs of the Detektor show was conducted by the Institute for Political Research – Skopje (IPIS) on a representative sample of 1,119 respondents through a telephone poll conducted in the period from December 23 to 26.