Parliament Speaker Talat Xhaferi announced that he returned the draft bill to postpone the census to the Government because it had “technical issues”. Xhaferi already announced that he will obstruct the move to postpone the census that was agreed between VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM leaders Hristijan Mickoski and Zoran Zaev.

I was not present at the meeting when the political deal to postpone the census was made and I have no responsibility for the timing. You can’t count your chickens before they hatched, Xhaferi said.

The Albanian parties insist on having the “corona census” Zaev promised them go ahead in April as planned, and have already put in place infrastructure to register as many ethnic Albanians in the diaspora as possible. VMRO-DPMNE condemned Zaev’s move to allow that the diaspora is counted along with the actual residents of Macedonia, and also his idea to hold the census in the midst of a major Third Wave of the pandemic, that is sure to drive down turnout in the country. Albanian parties are hoping that these two effects combined will greatly increase their share of the overall population and are now trying to cancel Zaev’s belated agreement with Mickoski to postpone the census for September.