The Political Party “Platform Dignity and Truth” (PPPDA) says the pension system reform, which covers almost 700,000 people, was prepared in a hurry, without broad public consultations. In a press statement, the party says the government intends to obtain the adoption of the relevant law as a matter of urgency, before the winter holidays, when society is concerned about existential problems, even if the document was criticized by many experts and civil society representatives, IPN reports.
“By increasing the retirement age and length of service required before retiring, the government, which is directly responsible for the socioeconomic disaster in the country, tries again to do reforms at the expense of the people, making their own mistakes ad crimes the burden of the people. Given that life expectancy in Moldova is very low and the quality of life for most of the pensioners is horrible, the considerable increase in the retirement age should be the last stage of the pension system reform and only if the other actions do not produce the expected results,” says the statement of the PPPDA.
According to the signatories, the sources for financing the initiated reform are not clear, at least at the first stage. The government promises that starting with 2017, those who retired in 2001-2008 will benefit from a pension that will be by at most 35% higher, while the persons who will retire next year will get twice larger pensions than they would get now.
“Our calculations show that at least 500 million lei is needed additionally for delivering these promises at a time when there is an acute deficit of the social insurance budget, to which the transfers from the state budget next year will total almost 5.5 billion lei, as in 2016. The introduction of mandatory social contributions for individual farmers, given the state of affairs in agriculture and the continuous mass exodus in rural areas, cannot bring sufficient financial resources for fulfilling the false promises of the oligarchic and anti-popular government,” reads the statement.
The party’s position is that the crisis in the pension system is due to the catastrophic situation in the national economy. To change the state of affairs, a number of steps should be taken, namely: to liquidate all the criminal schemes to appropriate money from the budget and state-run companies, to introduce fiscal stimuli for legal business, to intransigently fight the illegal payment of salaries, and others.
