Hungarian Alliance Party of Transylvania: The number of Hungarians in Romania has dramatically decreased by one fifth in a decade

The Hungarian population in Transylvania has declined dramatically, according to the preliminary results of the Romanian census published on Friday. The extent of the decline shows „the effectiveness of the silent genocide against Hungarians in peacetime”, the chair of the Hungarian Alliance of Transylvania (AMT) said, quoted by Rador.

The Transylvanian Hungarian Alliance is the only political competition for the UDMR within the Hungarian community. The census showed that Romania’s stable population has shrunk by almost 1.1 million over the past decade, while the ethnic Hungarian population has reached just over one million.

The Hungarian news agency MTI reported on Monday that the number of Hungarians living in Romania has decreased by 225,000 to just over one million since the last census in 2011. This means that in a decade the ethnic Hungarian community in Transylvania has lost one-fifth of its population.

„To better understand the seriousness of the situation, the population decrease is approximately the same as if the entire Hungarian population of Harghita county, where most ethnic Hungarians live, had disappeared,” reads the document signed by the national presidency of the Hungarian Alliance of Transylvania, formed by the merger of the Hungarian People’s Party and the Hungarian Civic Party.

The AMT pointed out that the rate and proportion of demographic decline have steadily accelerated over the past three decades, and the total Hungarian population in Romania has decreased by more than 620,000 since the first post-revolutionary census in 1992.

„This means that in three decades we have lost almost 40% of our community members.”

Thus, the number of Hungarians in Transylvania and Partium has fallen to the level of the 1850s. The AMT warns that if nothing changes, the Hungarians of Transylvania, who were once a constituent factor, could yet this century reach the end of their more than millennium-old history.

In this serious situation, the AMT national presidency considers that any explanation that tries to minimize the problem or to present the result as a partial success is a sin committed against the community. It must be stated, in no uncertain terms, that the figure of one million people is not an achievement, it is not a success, it is not a cause for celebration, but a serious and alarming disaster.

„There can be no political gain or party interest that would allow the census result to be presented as a partial success and we call on all Hungarian politicians to put their own communication interests, at least in this matter, behind the community interest,” the statement added.

According to AMT, the dramatic loss of population is not only due to the economic situation and the poor education of Hungarians compared to the national average, but is also due to the general crisis of values resulting from the faulty political practice of subordinating all local and national issues – crucial for the preservation of community identity – to the electoral success for the Parliament in Bucharest and the communication aspects of the ongoing election campaign, the document added.