New Direction

New direction

On the 6^th of April 2009, the day following the Parliamentary elections, when the counting of almost 98% of votes showed that communists have won again (obtaining almost 50% and 61 seats out of 101 in the Parliament ), the teenagers gathered at the monument of Stefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great) from the National Square in Chisinau. Each one of them was holding a lightened candle in his hands for to declare this day the National Mourning Day.

Most people found out about this initiative through different web channels – blogs, forums and especially twitter. People were surprised and enthusiastic to see that at first more than a thousand of participants gathered and in the next hour there were already 10,000 of them. After lighting candles at the monument of the national historic leader of all Moldovan people, the teenagers went to the Parliament shouting “Down with the communists!”, “Better dead then communist!”, “I refuse, I resist! I am anti-communist!”, “Freedom!”, “Down with the censorship!”, “We want a new election!”

The teenagers didn’t want to live in a country ruled by communists anymore. Moldova needed a new direction, a direction to development, the direction to European Union. Because of the high level of migration of young people abroad, the majority of voters were old people who still live with communistic ideology, and who don’t understand that the Soviet Union is gone, the communist party won the previous 2 elections and ruined the country for the last 8 years. In 2007-2008 over 35 percent of the country's GDP came from foreign remittances. There are no jobs in Moldova for its citizens of working age; for most young Moldovans there is no future in their native land.

Starting with September 2009 Moldova has been governed by a coalition of liberal-democratic parties, which succeeded the Communist Party that ruled for the last eight years. In little over a year the government has managed to launch a whole series of sweeping reforms aimed to transform Moldova and bring it closer to the EU standards. But now, after the 28 November 2010 elections, Moldova has to decide whether its transformation continues, or the country will lapse back into a state of lethargic non-reform.

Generally speaking, Moldova has had a bad image over the last two decades. This spring Moldova launched in Brussels a mid-term reform strategy entitled Rethink Moldova which obtained pledges of support worth €1.9 billion by the European Union, the United States, the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors. The country also managed to improve the business environment and investment climate by cutting down the bureaucracy and simplifying the administrative burden on foreign investors. The World Bank placed Moldova among the Top 10 reformers in the world when it comes to the costs of doing business. The government also set up an E-Governance Centre to drastically cut down the bureaucracy and corruption when it comes to any interaction between the state and its citizens. The driving force of most of these achievements is Moldova's desire to join the EU. Up to seventy percent of the population supports EU accession.

There is no doubt that Moldova still has a lot of challenges to overcome, but Moldova has already made its choice – it wants to become a mainstream European state by integrating with the European Union.

This is what the new generation of this country wants and they already showed that they are ready to fight for their hope, for their better future.