Some experts have unfavorable opinions of the proposed territorial-administrative reform. “The administrative-territorial reform can break the personal connection between the villager and his or her mayor. Through such a reform, leaders will be alienated from the communities, from the problems they manage, and this will have moral, economic, social, ecological and other consequences”, thinks the conflictologist and institutional analyst Benedict Ciubotaru.

A working group set up by the Government has proposed three versions of the reform. All of them involve a significant reduction in the number of mayor’s offices – to 231, or 154, or 93, from the current 896.

“If mayor’s offices disappear, people will lose their representation. In villages, people know their local election candidates personally. If mayor’s offices are liquidated in sparsely populated villages, mayoral elections will be similar to the parliamentary elections: voters may be put in a position to vote for strangers from the village where the town hall is located. Now the mayor is directly accessible to the villagers. Some 90% of problems are solved directly, without much bureaucracy.”

“The reduction of town halls in villages with small populations will mean a transition to a provider-customer type of relationship, where the people in smaller villages attached to a village with a larger population could be discriminated against. This will lead to an exponential acceleration of rural depopulation processes, as it happened when schools and hospitals were optimized in some villages”, says Benedict Ciubotaru.

Vitalie Cazacu, a doctor of economics and director of the Public Administration Academy’s Doctoral School, says that the reform is necessary, but clear criteria are needed for establishing the number of mayors in rural areas. “There are villages with larger populations. If mayors in such villages get additional tasks for the villages whose town halls will be dissolved, this could disrupt the activity of town halls in the former villages”, says Vitalie Cazacu.

At the same time, the expert believes that the optimal number of counties for Moldova is three, not five as proposed. He suggests building modern service providing institutions, such as hospitals, in the North and in the South to alleviate the burden on Chisinau.

Earlier Speaker Igor Grosu stated that the territorial-administrative reform needs to be implemented before the general local elections, so this will be a priority on the Government’s 2022 agenda.