AEI leaders won’t accept Russian language status for referendum

“It’s time that we stopped speculating about this issue”, said acting president Mihai Ghimpu, when asked by Info-Prim Neo to comment on the proposal formulated by 18 NGOs, which suggested that two more questions should be asked at the referendum in September, one of which concerns granting the status of official language to Russian. The proposal was initially formulated by the Ravnopravie /Equity/ party. “The Russian language has already got a very strong status in the Republic of Moldova. In fact, there isn’t any other former Soviet nation that has given a more favorable status to Russian than us. Just look around, there are Russian-language papers, channels, and sometimes they even prevail. (Ravnopravie leader Valeri) Klimenko has always speculated to gain votes from it. People won’t vote for something like this anymore, they want to vote for welfare”, stated Mihai Ghimpu, who is also the leader of the Liberal Party. Prime Minister Vlad Filat, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, said the referendum in September would have just one question, that concerning the way of electing the president. “We want to unblock the constitutional crisis, and then concern ourselves with the multitude of other problems that exist”. Moldova Noastra party leader Serafim Urecheanu said the request must be first registered formally with the Parliament. “It wouldn’t be fair to say yea or nay right now”. Commenting on the second question proposed for the referendum, Deputy Speaker Urecheanu said he disliked the idea of allocating a certain number of MP seats to ethnic minorities. This, thinks Urecheanu, should be the concern of each political party when it draws the party ticket ahead of elections; that is, to include minority representatives at this stage. On Friday, June 18, at a news conference, eighteen nongovernmental organizations defending the rights of ethnic minorities in Moldova announced their support for the proposal of the Ravnopravie party, which suggested that, besides the way of electing the president, two more questions should be asked in the upcoming referendum: whether Russian should be the second official language and whether a fifth of MP seats should be allocated to ethnic minorities.