North Macedonia has a total of 3,504 people who declared themselves Bulgarians in the census conducted last year, and whose results were announced yesterday.
The number of people who reported that they usually speak Bulgarian at home is 762, or more than four times less than the number of registered Bulgarians. Also, this figure is about two times smaller than the number of people who declared that their mother tongue is Bulgarian, that is, there are 1,519 such people living in the country.
Although in the report published yesterday we cannot see how the population living in North Macedonia that declared themselves of Bulgarian nationality is distributed by municipalities, it is interesting to note that the number of 3,504 Bulgarians is somewhere 60% higher than the number of Croats living in North Macedonia.
Also, in last year’s census, 23,847 people living in the country declared themselves as Serbs and 16,042 as Bosniaks.
Those 3,504 people registered as Bulgarians make up 0.19% of the country’s total resident population. Divided by sex, 2,121 of those identified as Bulgarians are men and 1,383 are women.
Such figures for the resident population in North Macedonia are much lower than some figures publicized in Bulgaria and by some factors in this country about the total number of people in Macedonia who have a Bulgarian passport in other words, citizenship. In conclusion, the number of those who received Bulgarian passports is tens and tens of times higher than those who declared themselves Bulgarians in the census.
Regarding the number of Bulgarian passports issued to Macedonian residents according to the Bulgarian news agency Bgnes owned by the Skopje-born Lyubcho Neshkov, in 2020 alone, 9,000 Macedonians received Bulgarian passports, while in 2021 their number was 7,692. I.e. generally speaking, in the last 15 years, 86,566 Macedonian citizens became Bulgarian citizens, which is more than half of all the members of other nations who received Bulgarian citizenship in the past 15 years, that is, a total of 162,865 foreigners in the last 15 years received Bulgarian citizenship.
Nevertheless entering the Bulgarians into the preamble of the Constitution of North Macedonia is one of the demands of the Bulgarian side in the negotiations for overcoming the dispute due to which Bulgaria has blocked setting a date for the start of North Macedonia’s EU accession negotiations.
