Director of the State Statistical Office (SSO) Apostol Simovski said in an interview for news agency Makfax that the citizens have been facing pressures to not accept the 2021 Population Census in the past three years. “Many political centres came out with campaigns against the Census and calls for its boycott. Unfortunately, many citizens heeded that call, because of which we have a situation in which 132,000 citizens, or almost 7.2% of the population of our country, did not participate in this statistical operation, and in accordance with the methodology approved for this Census, we enumerated them with data acquired from other institutions of the state. Also, some media published results before the official publication by SSO, and they should be criminally prosecuted, because they published wrong data, and need to prove where they acquired them from,” Simovski said, adding that political parties and centres tend to interpret the official data of the 2021 Population Census in favour of their political agendas.