The main danger to Moldova’s European future comes from inside the country, not outside it. The corrupt political and economic elites can undermine the European course by poor implementation of reforms and by giving reasons for the people to make negative image associations between these elites and the European integration process. Such opinions were formulated in the public debate entitled “Political culture in the context of polarization of political options in Moldova. Pro-European option: change as a chance and remedies against fear of change”, staged by IPN Agency in partnership with Radio Moldova.
“The European integration process is weakened by the corrupt elites and this is the biggest problem of Moldova. If we do not solve this problem, our chances of integrating into the EU will be diminished not by external imperial forces, but by ourselves. We are the greatest enemy of our future,” said Igor Botan, executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy, who is the project’s permanent expert. The analyst stated that the EU is also affected by corruption, as for example Italy, but those involved in such scandals there are jailed. Igor Botan believes that in Moldova, the vote is the main instrument for punishing the corrupt politicians and the way in which the voters react to the accusations of corruption between political leaders in the November 30 elections depends first of all on the political culture of the population.
“Regretfully, the corrupt elites seriously hamper our progress on the path to European integration. But corruption is also directly related to this Brownian motion inside society. The fact that there is no cohesion causes this corruption. Things are interdependent between them. We cannot solve the problem of corruptibility until we do not solve the problem of national unity. The people do not have reasons to fight corruption as long as this country is not theirs,” said Anatol Taranu, director of the Institute for Political Analysis and Consultancy “Politicon”.
Head of the EU Delegation to Moldova Pirkka Tapiola said he is worried that the business and politics in Moldova are too close, but noted that these ties seem to be a local typical feature and do not refer to one government only. According to him, the solution is to replace the top-down model of government with the bottom-up model where the leaders are elected not to govern but to serve the people, being accountable to those who elected them.
The October 16 debate is the 34th of the series of debates “Development of political culture in public debates”. IPN Agency stages these debates the third consecutive year with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation and in cooperation with Radio Moldova.
