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Highest number of Bulgarian passports issued to citizens of North Macedonia since start-2021

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1,458 people have acquired Bulgarian citizenship since the beginning of the year, Dimitar Zdravkov, a member of the Bulgarian President's Commission on Bulgarian Citizenship, told BNR. Most Bulgarian passports were issued to citizens of North Macedonia. 


In the past year, 16,000 people have become Bulgarian citizens - 10,000 of them are North Macedonians, followed by Ukrainians, Serbs, Moldovans, Albanians and Turks. 

According to Dimitar Zdravkov, it is not true that the procedure for obtaining Bulgarian citizenship is cumbersome and slow. "The legislative regulations set a reasonable time frame in line with the importance of the procedure," he said. 

When a persons submits application documents for Bulgarian citizenship to the Ministry of Justice, it takes between 6 and 18 months before the minister refers his proposal to the president.



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