Seeking EU membership is a complex process in which the entire Moldovan society and all political parties should be involved, stated Igor Munteanu, expert with the IDIS Viitorul think tank, during a conference discussing Moldova’s EU accession roadmap after it achieved candidate country status.
The roadmap has been developed by the Moldovan authorities to guide them through implementing the nine conditions formulated by the European Commission when Moldova obtained candidate status. It contains 60 actions, and 40 of them concern legislation adjustments
But civil society representatives find the document to be “vague”, as it doesn’t contain actions that will immediately change Moldovans’ lives.
“People’s lives don’t change because a law changes today. Whenever legislative changes are planned, this means that the changes will not be noticed soon. Of the 40 actions, one-third refer to laws that have already entered into force and were amended before the action plan was adopted. The frequent change of the legislative framework entails risks of corruption. Changing the rules of play frequently is quite destabilizing, and in the transition processes people commit abuses”, says anti-corruption expert Cristina Ciubotaru.
However, government representatives insist that the plan contains immediate actions aimed at aligning the national legislation with the European one. The European Union’s conditions imposed on Moldova include the judicial reform and the fight against corruption, the elimination of oligarchic influences on the economy, the political system and mass media, the improvement of electoral legislation, and the public administration reform.
“Before taking the next step towards the opening of accession negotiations, we must implement the nine conditions imposed by the European Union. The action plan for the implementation of the nine conditions formulated by the European Commission was drafted quite quickly. Furthermore, the nine conditions are very general. In the case of Georgia and Ukraine, they are much more specific. In our case, on most of the conditions, we had to figure out for ourselves what is required of us. Our goal was to have a sufficiently manageable implementation instrument. We thought it should be a one-hundred-page, compact plan that can grasp the attention of all political decision-makers”, said Vladimir Cuc, state secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration.
The public conference titled “Moldova’s foreign and security policy in light of the European integration ambition” was organized by IDIS Viitorul, the Institute for Legal, Political and Sociological Research, and the Security and Crisis Management Study Center.
