Despite the rising coronavirus infection numbers and the plan to introduce overnight curfews starting on Wednesday, the Zaev regime still plans to go ahead with an in-person census. The process should begin in April and will include census taking teams visiting individual households for over half an hour to collect their data.

The regime refused requests from the opposition to postpone the census for later in the year, as the infection rate hopefully drops. It also rejected all other safety precautions requested by the opposition to prevent double counting of residents and to exclude the diaspora. This added to the impression that Zaev has a deal in place with the ethnic Albanian parties he is dependent on to inflate the Albanian share of the population by counting the emigrants in the diaspora as residents reducing the census to a count of all citizens, not just the actual residents.

According to the opposition, this means that the census will be an exercise in futility, as Macedonia has up to date registries of citizens, but not one of active residents. Thousands of people are likely to be endangered with the census visits just to maintain one of the promises Zaev made to his Albanian coalition partners.