Viorel Furdui, Executive Director of the Congress of Local Authorities of Moldova (CALM), said that the local public administration reform is sinking deeper and deeper into what he described as “chaos, incompetence and lawlessness.” In this context, the Congress has put forward a series of proposals, reports TRIBUNA.

CALM has called on the authorities to complete the voluntary amalgamation process, suspend the “normative amalgamation” process until Parliament adopts an organic law, stop consultations organized without the participation of local authorities and annul the minutes resulting from such consultations.

The organization has also called for the local referendum process to be unblocked, while insisting that the fundamental question on the agenda of any consultation should be whether a locality will remain an administrative-territorial unit.

“CALM has been calling for the elimination of districts, genuine fiscal decentralization, real regionalization and municipalization, the broad application of various forms of association and intermunicipal cooperation, as well as genuine and exclusively voluntary amalgamation for fifteen years. That is precisely why we cannot remain silent now, when all these goals are being compromised for a generation because of a method that violates the law and humiliates elected local officials,” Furdui said.

According to him, no successful and sustainable administrative-territorial reform has ever been built on haste, a political timetable, manipulation, abuse, a lack of transparency or ignoring citizens.

“Administrative disasters, on the other hand, are built on exactly these things. And they are built very well,” he added.

Furdui also said that “the rule of law is the first criterion by which the European Union judges a candidate country. Not the third. The first. And what is being done now in Moldova, in the name of reform and in the name of Europe, openly defies it.”

“We are not challenging the reform. We are challenging the way it is being carried out. And this approach has taken several steps backwards in recent months,” Viorel Furdui said.

Among the problems highlighted by the CALM executive director are:

• the absence of a proper legal framework;
• guidelines and concepts that have no legal basis;
• deadlines that are not established by law;
• a lack of connection with specific territorial circumstances;
• consultations held merely to check a box;
• legislation being drafted after the outcome has already been determined.