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| THE YOUNGEST MAYOR OF A EUROPEAN CAPITAL CITY(27.06.2007) |
| (2007-06-27) |
| Last updated: 2007-06-28 19:00 EET |
It is not by chance that the newly elected mayor of Kishinaw, and the youngest mayor of a European capital city, Dorin Chirtoaca, 29, has paid his first visit abroad to Bucharest. Traditionally, these visits have been considered a sort of political signal launched by Moldovan leaders. From Petru Lucinschi to Vladimir Voronin, all presidents of the former Soviet republic paid their first visits to Moscow, after winning the elections.
The mayors of Kishinaw however, set a different example. Mayor Nicolae Costin gave Romanian names to all the streets in the Moldovan capital city, Serafim Urecheanu removed all Russian servants and clerks from the offices they had held in the City Hall and the mayor elect, Dorin Chirtoaca, now follows in their footsteps; all these mayors have considered Romania’s capital city closer to Moldova than the capital city of the Russian Federation, although Russian speakers in Kishinaw account for more than half of the population, which numbers 750,000 inhabitants.
Paradoxically, Kishinaw’s mayor office has been a vanguard post of Romanian ideas since 1991, when the Republic of Moldova proclaimed its independence. Normally, the communists who hold power at almost all levels, should have grabbed this strategic point, too.
But the local elections held this month have offered a big surprise; communists lost Kishinaw, suffering the severest political defeat since 2000. Kishinaw is an important center of the Republic of Moldova, not only because a quarter of the country’s population lives there, but also because it always set the tone for voters across the country.
After the electoral defeat in the capital city, communists might also lose parliamentary elections scheduled for 2009. The ice has been broken. The immobility of the communist rulers, their incapacity to take the country out of poverty, the failure to join the EU and a deteriorated, obsolete ideological component have been penalized by Moldovan voters, the same people who throng the Romanian Consulate in Kishinaw for more than a year now, in an effort to regain Romanian citizenship.
A new rapprochement between the Republic of Moldova and Romania has been achieved through Dorin Chirtoaca’s success. And the Moldovan mayor’s visit to Bucharest is a signal showing that a large part of Moldova’s population explicitly wants this rapprochement. What could be the consequences of this new path that the Moldovans have embarked on?
The new developments will undoubtedly upset the communists’ plans and will determine Russia to approach more realistically the relations with its neighbors, Romania included. In the long run, both Romania and the Republic of Moldova will have something to gain. And let us remember that after becoming Romania’s Presdient, Traian Basescu symbolically made his first visit abroad to Kishinaw. Dorin Chirtoaca is now making a similar gesture.
(Valentin Tigau)
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2025-04-03
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