Dodon intends to catch Sanda by the tongue and is preparing the Maidan

Former President of Moldova Igor Dodon is threatening mass protests against yesterday’s decision of the country’s constitutional court, which overturned the law granting Russian the status of a language of interethnic communication.

He stated this today during a conversation with like-minded people on the Internet, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“Yesterday’s decision of the constitutional court will have very serious consequences. Next week there will be mass protests in most cities of the republic, which will spill over into protests in Chisinau,” Dodon said.

He places personal responsibility for the decision of the Constitutional Court on the new president, the pro-Western Maia Sandu, although formally deputies not from her party appealed to the court. In order to bring his rival out into the open, Dodon wants to force her to sign a new language law or publicly renounce it (the previous law was promulgated by Dodon himself, however, at the end of his term).

“We have already developed and will register a new bill today, which will be put to a vote at the first meeting of parliament on February 4. We will insist that this law be passed. We will find a way to get it voted on. And we’ll see: Maia Sandu will let him through or not,” Dodon said.

He recalled that Sandu, when she was Minister of Education, excluded the Russian language from the curricula of Moldovan schools, and compared opponents of the Russian language law to participants in the war with Transnistria.

“Now, just like in the early 90s, someone is raising a nationalist wave. Those marginalized people who insulted Russian-speaking citizens yesterday are about the same ones who shot on the Dniester in the early 90s. You are playing with fire,” Dodon said.

At the same time, he admitted that the status of the Russian language is a problem for the older generation, since all young people are fluent in Romanian (Dodon calls the language Moldovan). By the way, he himself recently began to duplicate posts in Romanian on his Telegram channel, which was previously entirely Russian-language.

Journalist Evgeniy Cheban believes that “any attempts to adopt a new organic law that contradicts these conclusions of the Constitutional Court will look like a populist provocation aimed at further inciting ethnic hatred.”

“Because such a law will easily be challenged in the same Constitutional Court and canceled. The Constitutional Court decided that language is one of the symbols of unity and an integral attribute of constitutional, and therefore civil, identity. This formulation of the question leaves non-native speakers outside of this identity. There is no such thing in the Constitution,” Cheban wrote on his Facebook.

It will no longer be possible to resolve the issue in a formal legal manner. Sandu took the bait of language hype. Her presidential adviser on health care, Alla Nemerenko, burst out on Facebook with a post condemning Russian speakers.

“I am amazed at how disrespectful the Romanian language, the language of the indigenous people, is treated by some of those whom my country warmly welcomed and embraced as its children - Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Russians, Belarusians. What's going on with these people? And for many of them it is not even their native language. And this is when the Romanian language is divinely beautiful,” Nemerenko wrote.

The publication received dozens of comments. In them, the president’s supporters call representatives of national minorities “savages,” “chauvinists,” and “traitors.”

Sandu is put in a difficult position, because before the elections she actively spoke in Russian and assured that she would not infringe on the rights of Russian-speaking citizens.

Her relationship with Russia, which she promised to improve, is also in question. The Russian Embassy in Chisinau issued a statement.

“The verdict of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Moldova seems to be an alarming factor in the context of maintaining interethnic peace in the multinational Moldovan state. Against this background, the radicals’ insults against the leadership of our country, the people of Russia and Russian-speaking citizens of the Republic of Moldova look blasphemous and unnatural,” the statement says.