Moldova: a devoted language

The Socialist Party of ex-President of Moldova Igor Dodon did not live up to the expectations of Russian speakers. The Law on the Functioning of Languages, which they adopted in haste after losing the elections, did not pass muster for compliance with the Constitution. The rallies organized by the socialists in support of the Russian language turned out to be small in number and scared other parties away from the common cause.

New law, old claims

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

The parliament adopted a new version of the law on the functioning of languages ​​on the territory of the Republic of Moldova on December 16 last year. Before it, there was a law adopted back in 1989 by the Supreme Council of the Moldavian SSR. Despite the passage of decades, this regulation was still in effect. It guaranteed respect for the status of the Russian language as a language of interethnic communication, and also ensured the rights of the languages ​​of other national minorities. In 2018, the Constitutional Court declared the 1989 law obsolete. But he did not cancel it - parliament had to develop new legislative norms in the field of linguistics. The coalition of Dodon’s socialists and Plahotniuc’s democrats, then in power, left this subject without attention for two years.

The exact reasons why the socialists remembered the language legislation only ten days before Dodon left the presidency are unknown to the public. Some experts believed that Dodon wanted to plant a linguistic pig on Sandu on the eve of her coming to power. Others believe that he was trying to gain support from the Russian-speaking electorate on the eve of early parliamentary elections.

Guaranteeing the official status of the language of interethnic communication to the Russian language was an integral part of the program of the Party of Socialists in the parliamentary elections in 2014 and of Igor Dodon in the presidential elections of 2016. Be that as it may, socialists and deputies of the wanted Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor formed the majority, which adopted a new law on the functioning of languages.

The bill provided that the Russian language would receive the official status of a language of interethnic communication. Officials bore “personal responsibility” for refusing to respond to citizens in Russian. All names of goods and services produced in the country, medicines, as well as signs of state and public institutions were to be translated into Russian. With the exception of the clause on “personal liability,” the new law completely repeated the old one.

The very next day after its adoption, deputies of pro-European parties protested the new law on the functioning of languages ​​in the Constitutional Court. As one would expect, the Constitutional Court, formed by more than half of the nominees of these parties, repealed the law. The court motivated its decision by the fact that the Constitution does not contain the concept of “official language” and thus granting such status to the Russian language “undermines the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova and puts other languages ​​in an unequal position in relation to it.”

Numbers and the Constitution

According to the head of the Constitutional Court, Domnika Manole, when making their verdict, the judges were guided by statistics. According to the 2014 census, Moldovan/Romanian is the native language of the country for the vast majority of citizens (77%), Russian is the mother tongue for 9,39%, Gagauz for 4.08%, Ukrainian for 3.82%, and Bulgarian for 1.48%. Thus, according to the court, the bill under consideration did not provide a balance between the protection of the state language and the position of other languages ​​spoken in the country.

Journalist Elena Levitskaya-Pakhomova countered Manole’s argument with figures from the latest population census.

“In 9 regions of Moldova, the share of Ukrainian language use is higher than Russian. And in 15 out of 32 districts, the difference in the use of Russian and Ukrainian as two languages ​​is no more than 2%,” said Levitskaya-Pakhomova.

Russian-speaking users of the Moldovan segment of social networks also massively criticized the decision of the Constitutional Court. A table of statistical data from the social network Facebook about the language preferences of users from Moldova was distributed among social groups and public pages.

According to these data, 1,2 million indicated Romanian as their language of communication, 1,1 million – Russian, 21 thousand – Ukrainian, 6,3 thousand – Turkish, etc.

The decision of the Constitutional Court to rely on statistics from the 2014 population census conducted by the Alliance for European Integration, which was in power, was criticized by the Russian-speaking part of the public. The census carried out at that time is considered inaccurate due to numerous violations during its conduct. At the same time, supporters of European integration rejoiced - the Russian language for them is a marker of sympathizers of the “Russian world” in Moldova.

Mouse rallies

In defense of the Russian language, socialists organized protests throughout the country. Pompously announced, they ended in nothing. Of the 38 cities in the country, the PSRM held marches in only ten of them. Each of these marches turned out to be just a half-hour rally involving a few dozen people. The sluggish and few protests demonstrated the helplessness of the Socialist Party and its complete lack of desire and ability to actively fight for the rights of Russian speakers in Moldova. However, at the same time, the socialists and Dodon completely monopolized the cause of protecting the Russian language and forced other left parties to refrain from participating in the protests.

“Dodon simply decided to politically sell this popular topic of the Russian language among the population. He could really raise the status of the Russian language at a time when he had a majority in parliament, his own government and was in the presidency. But then he didn’t think about it,” believes Igor Tulyantsev, chairman of the Moldovan public council “For a Free Homeland.”

The public figure claims that Dodon was solely seeking a PR effect. “He wanted to show his electorate and external partners in the Russian Federation that only he can fight for the rights of Russian-speaking citizens in the republic,” Tulyantsev emphasized indignantly.

In turn, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, reminded the newly elected President Maia Sandu of her election promise to ensure that the use of the Russian language “is at the level.”

“She urged people not to believe the “horror stories” that after her election the rights of the Russian-speaking population to study and apply to government agencies in their native language would be infringed. Less than a month after her inauguration, these promises were broken,” the diplomat said.

Zakharova also noted that the issue of the status of the Russian language is of great importance for maintaining social stability and interethnic harmony in Moldovan society, as well as in the context of the Transnistrian settlement.