Yesterday protests in the center of Chisinau gathered about three thousand people. Initiators state that people are coming from all regions of the country to express their protest against the authorities. The Prime Minister of Moldova, Valeriu Strelet, has already stated that the mass protests are disrupting talks on getting IMF support, a delegation from which should arrive in the country in the very near future.
Meanwhile, Yuri Nagernyak, Director General of the International Fund for Promotion of Culture, Science and Education ‘Humanism, Progress and the Rule of Law’, thinks, contrary to the position of the majority of ordinary Moldovans, that Moldova won't be dragged into Europe by force, not directly, but through Romania.
Nagernyak’s father was born in Bessarabia, when it was a part of Romania. “I was told by my father that Bessarabia, which was considered an integral part of Romania, was the most downtrodden, the most impoverished, the most powerless among all the Romanian territories. And today, if it happens again, the situation is exactly the same. Moldovans who stand for entering as a part of Romania consider themselves to be Romanians, but they forget that the Romanians consider them as such only by half. And this way for Moldova is the worst of all, but the most likely one,” the expert says.
According to him, “after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when they adopted the concept of a sharp turn in the political arena on the principles of Western democracy to the liberal market economy sphere, we have forgotten that the West was going through this formula for several centuries. And there was more or less a perfected balancing mechanism. We, the heirs of the Soviet Union, received almost a vacuum, an empty space where we were told that we would have a democracy from today and the economy would be a market economy from now on. The main principle of the Western system of governance is that politics is strictly separated from business, because the motivations are the opposite in one and the other spheres. Politics must ensure the public interest, the interests of the state; business protects private interests, the interests of a mercantile character. The toolkit, which provides the balance in the West, has not been built in the post-Soviet space. Therefore, in Moldova, as well as in other republics of the USSR, there was a very fast splicing of the control system with the business system.”
Yuri Nagernyak is sure that in Moldova “the main motive for the adoption of certain political decisions was not the wealth of the state, not the search for optimal ways of development and the development of business, but getting someone’s private dividends. As a result, Moldova has faced a situation where it is some kind of an oligarchic field, where not only is the economy run by a narrow group of people, but politics itself is built on the principles of business - you come, you buy this, you prepay that… But sums are small according to the world scale. The protests, where people are going onto the streets because they have nowhere else to go, have been used to promote someone’s private interests. And these private interests are the global interests of the West.”
