On a scale ranging from “unsatisfactory” to “excellent”, the current Parliament will no way get “excellent” for the work done during the spring-summer session. It will also not get “good”, but rather “satisfactory”, IPN project’s standing expert Igor Boțan stated in a public debate entitled “How much and how Parliament worked for the people during spring-summer session?”, which was staged by IPN News Agency.
According to the expert, Parliament will get “satisfactory” because all the existing problems prevented it from working appropriately. Nevertheless, the very pressing problems were solved. The SMEs are in a very difficult situation and this is a big failure of the Government and Parliament. Surely, there are infrastructure priorities with an electoral impact, but there are people who developed more or less viable businesses, investing money during several years, and it is not fair for this pandemic to bring them to their knees.
Igor Boțan related that the Ombudsman proposed tens of good initiatives, but these were simply ignored by Parliament, including those related to Article 76 of the Contravention Code that stipulated very heavy fines for the violation of the sanitary rules against the average official salary. The problem was solved by the Constitutional Court, but with a great delay.
The expert also said it is normal for the representatives of the government coalition to exhibit the Parliament’s successes as the opposition presents the own proposals and the government’s failures. The MPs took into account the specific pandemic situation the past session. Parliament managed to mobilize and work with the development partners amid the pandemic. The foreign financing was unblocked and very impotent agreements were signed with the EU and with international financial organizations.
“In general, the government overcame the very bad situation and ultimate explained what it did. Moldova’s public debt is very small and this is very good. Moldova is among the countries with the smallest public debt, but the Government decided to borrow money and amended the state budget law. We have a very large budget deficit, but the administration is confident that it will finally manage to implement the budget law and to gain political advantages,” said Igor Boțan.
The debate “How much and how Parliament worked for the people during spring-summer session?” was the 145th installment of the series “Developing political culture through public debates” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
