Owing to technical conditions, President Igor Dodon could not fly to Brussels to take part in the Crans Montana Forum of June 28, 2018. However, it is gladdening that the speech prepared by the President was made public. The speech was absolutely surprising from a number of standpoints. The most important thing is related to the strategic development of the Republic of Moldova: Our goal is to modernize and develop the Republic of Moldova. Reforms are to be implemented exclusively for the people’s benefit. We are to work out a strategic reform plan so that when the Republic of Moldova’s entry into the European Union is debated, the country is prepared from all viewpoints.
So, absolutely surprisingly, without any ambiguity, President Dodon announces that work is done on a strategic plan that prepares the conditions for Moldova’s entry into the EU? He refers also to a series of global and regional challenges that hamper the achievement of this objective, such as regional security, the Transnistrian conflict, the crisis in Ukraine, demographic developments, economic isolationism, poverty, terrorism, etc.
It should be noted that in the speech prepared by the President, the economic and commercial problems were treated in a new, reviewed manner. He now pleads for overcoming economic isolationism, even if at the St. Petersburg Economic Summit of June 2017 he pleaded for glocalization as a remedy against globalization. Also, for the first time the President noted that: with the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the EU, the country lost access to the Russian market owing to the restrictions imposed unilaterally by the official Moscow.
As a responsible politician, President Dodon said the Republic of Moldova has to look for efficient methods of cooperation with the West and with the East. This means the promotion of a balanced foreign policy: to maintain and extend the relations with the European Union and to simultaneously restore the good relations with the Russian Federation.
The President’s approaches to the global and regional problems faced by Moldova are also important: organization of a new meeting of the heads of state and government of the OSCE member states for debating regional security problems; reformation of the United Nations Organization (UN), especially the Security Council; convocation of representative international meetings to reaffirm the current legal framework of the international system or to propose a new architecture of the relations between nations, etc.
Evidently, the solutions proposed by the Presidents are very important, but they can be implemented by international political players with a heavy weight. That’s why they automatically become suggestions for important players. Another major question is if the President consulted the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM), which he headed for six years and whose programmatic documents he worked out? These documents envisions things that explicitly run counter to theses from the President’s speech prepared for the Crans Montana Forum. The decisive question is – are we so unfortunate that some banal technical conditions can prevent our flight to Brussels? Or there were also some other reasons that we don’t yet know?
IPN experts
