For three years, there has been tremendous pressure from citizens not to accept the census, the director of the State Statistical Office, Apostol Simovski, said in an interview with “Makfax”.

Asked how much the boycott contributed to the results and how the number of 132,000 unregistered citizens noted by the opposition will be justified, Simovski said: “I will ask them where those 132,000 citizens were during the census. A good part of them fell for the persuasion to boycott the census.”

Regarding the initially published results of the census in some media, Simovski says that those who published them deserve to be punished: “They deserve to be punished criminally as well because they have to prove that someone gave them data – wrong data.”