The Romanian Hungarian Democratic Association (RMDSZ) is launching an information campaign related to the census starting in March, Kelemen Hunor, president of the association, announced at a press conference in Cluj.

According to the president of the RMDSZ, the census is a community matter in which everyone can help. He added: they want an efficient and fair census, during which the Hungarian people are counted correctly. At the same time , he asked the Hungarians to boldly confess their ethnic, religious affiliation, and their mother tongue. In fact, the data just published will form the basis for securing language rights in the next ten years, among other things.

The politician added: the RMDSZ also recruits volunteers who help the population in the first stage of the census, in which it is possible to fill out the online questionnaire in person. He called it important that as much data as possible be entered into the census database during the self-filling period, because if there are no intermediaries, errors cannot slip in.

Executive Vice President Anna Horváth, head of the national census working group, said that since the working group was established last September, county working groups have been formed. Their goal is to organize assistance and information in all settlements where more than fifty Hungarians live. According to the data of the previous census, they know of 1,239 such settlements.

Anna Horváth added: a third of the Hungarians in Romania live in a settlement that is not led by a Hungarian leader, and the role of church, educational, and civil partners is enhanced in these settlements, since here in the second phase of the census, an enumerator who does not know Hungarian may knock on the door. The head of the working group considered it a big challenge to reach the estimated 250-300 thousand Romanian Hungarians living abroad...

...In response to a journalist's question, Kelemen Hunor said: if the efficiency of the census goes below 90 percent, and more than ten percent of the data is entered from other administrative databases that do not indicate nationality, then it is also possible that the number of Hungarians in Romania will be below one million in the statistics it's raining

Source: erdely.ma

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(Cover photo: MTI/Gábor Kiss)