He called for filling out the questionnaire online by May 16 and answering every question including the ones on ethnic and religious identity.Continue reading
Based on the final results of the census conducted in Romania last year, reflecting the situation on December 1, 2021, the number of Hungarians in the country can be estimated at 1.1 million, experts from the website Nepszamlalas.ro, helping to census Hungarians in Romania, said in an analysis published on Monday.
László Baranyi, MTI correspondent, reported on Monday that sociologists of the portal run by the Association of the Center for Public Policy Analysis in Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca in today’s Romania), presume that within a settlement, the same number of people live without nationality data as those who have declared it.
The official results showed 19,053,815 inhabitants in Romania, of whom
1,002,151 declared themselves Hungarian. However, the nationality of almost 2.5 million people was not registered, and experts estimate that there are a further 100,000 Hungarians among them.
They said that of the 2.5 million people of unknown nationality, around 1.5 million filled in the census form only partially, possibly not deliberately, due to an error in the internet website. A further 1 million were either not using the internet self-completion facility or were not reached by the enumerators, with their data being transferred from administrative registers to the census database, without their nationality marked.
According to Nepszamlalas.ro, the number of people who deliberately did not declare their ethnicity was not significant in last year’s census either.
The portal also pointed out that the proportion of ethnicities will only be officially counted among those who declared their ethnicity, according to the methodology set out in a government emergency decree in 2020. Regarding this,
the proportion of Romanians is 89.33 percent, Hungarians 6.05 percent, Roma 3.44 percent, Ukrainians 0.28 percent, and Germans 0.14 percent, while the total proportion of other ethnic minorities is 0.77 percent.
If Hungarians also represent 6.05 percent of the population not declaring their nationalities, then in Romania, with 19 million inhabitants, one could assume the Hungarian population amounts to 1,140,000. However, the sociologists at Nepszamlalas.ro also took into account that Hungarians were less likely to be absent from the census, with a total rate of around nine percent of those with a partially completed questionnaire, or those who were included in administrative registers, compared to 13 percent in the whole country.
This means that the overall Hungarian community in Romania is about 1.1 million,
they concluded.
The analysis by Nepszamlalas.ro was highlighted in a statement by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania President, Hunor Kelemen, thanking those members of the community who have declared their Hungarian nationality, the thousands of participants in the information campaign, and those who, by amending the law,
have made it possible – for the first time in the last 30 years – to use Hungarian language when filling in the questionnaire.
“The results of the census are now known, and it is true that we have suffered sad losses. Instead of despairing and lamenting, however, I propose to ourselves, to all of us, that we continue the work we have begun for our homeland.
A community that is strong in the heart and soul and unshakable in its national identity will be able to do this, and our community is such a community,”
concluded the party’s president.
Featured image: Facebook/Potápi Árpád János