Prime Minister Zoran Zaev urged the public today to register in the census, even as the coronavirus epidemic infection rate and mortality rate are approaching levels from the worst days of the fall wave. Currently only emigrants are registering, through a website, but Zaev fully intends to send teams of census workers to households in April.

For us, as a state, it is very important that we know the number of emigrants so that we can correctly tailor our diplomatic and consular services. Economically, this will serve as the basis to protect your investments in the country, to attract them to invest or help their relatives. So I call on all the diaspora to use 10 minutes of its time and subscribe to the census, Zaev said.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry is also urging diaspora members to register. The Ministry is led by an ethnic Albanian Minister – Bujar Osmani – for the first time and is dedicated to the census, given that Albanian parties want to count the diaspora in full, believing it will inflate the Albanian share of the population. This is in violation with usual European standards, where only actual residents count toward the census.

Meanwhile, opposition official Ljupco Dimovski, member of Parliament from the VMRO-DPMNE led coalition, called on the Government to postpone the census until September, hoping that by then some amounts of vaccines will be distributed through the country.

I am deeply concerned by the stubbornness of the Government to force this census ahead. We have a curfew in place until March 22nd and just 10 days later we are supposed to begin an in-person census. We can easily be in a situation that our citizens are locked down in their homes overnight, but need to admit census teams during the day. That carries a very high risk of infection and we in the Renewal of Macedonia coalition share the opinion that the census needs to be postponed for at least six months, Dimovski said, noting that Serbia, Germany, Ireland and other European countries decided to postpone their censuses that were planned for 2021.