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According to the preliminary results of the Romanian census published on Friday, the dramatic decline in the number of Hungarian people in Transylvania is a clear indication of “the effectiveness of the silent destruction of Hungarians in peacetime”, the Hungarian Association of Transylvania (EMSZ) party believes.
The statement sent to MTI on Monday points out that compared to the last census in 2011, the number of Hungarians living in Romania has decreased by 225,000 to barely one million.
They underlined that the rate and proportion of the decrease have been steadily accelerating over the past three decades, and overall, the number of Hungarians in Romania has decreased by more than 620,000 compared to the first census after the regime change in 1992.
This means that in three decades we have lost almost 40 percent of our community,
bringing the number of Hungarians in Transylvania and the region back to the level of the 1850s. EMSZ warns that if nothing changes, the once state-forming Transylvanian Hungarians could be at the end of their more than a millennium-long history this century.
The largest Hungarian party in Transylvania, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ), commented more optimistically on the results. “According to the preliminary results of the census, the number of Hungarians in Romania is over 1 million. This means that we have maintained the proportion of Hungarians in Romanian society at over 6 percent”, President Hunor Kelemen said.
According to the EMSZ, “any explanation that tries to minimize the problem or to present the result as a partial success is a crime against the community”. “It must be said bluntly that the one million people is not an achievement, not a success, not a cause for celebration, but a serious and alarming disaster,” they wrote in a statement.
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