The administrative-territorial reform was an opportunity for the Republic of Moldova to get out of the fragmented map inherited from the Soviets and build regions capable of managing money, services and projects. The 32 districts are to become three regions: north, center and south. On paper, everything seems coherent. Then there is the exception: Taraclia, which will be neither a district nor part of the south region, but a level II municipality. Prime Minister Vasile Tofan described it as “a very elegant solution”. However, the solution he identified is problematic in the long term.
An administrative-territorial unit is not created to reward an ethnic community or to appease a foreign state, in this case Bulgaria. It exists to bring better services to citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. From the moment the map of the country is drawn according to the ethnic criterion, the state stops administering citizens with equal rights and starts administering ethnicities.
Political-historical precedent
No one can claim that the decision fell from the sky. The talks with Sofia were publicly acknowledged by the Secretary General of the Government, Alexei Buzu, and the Bulgarian Foreign Minister welcomed the solution before it was even voted on. Worse, the district councilors of Taraclia unanimously adopted an appeal to the Bulgarian leadership and to the Bulgarian MEPs. They demanded that Sofia warn Chisinau that, in the event of the liquidation of the district, Moldova might have difficulties in obtaining Bulgaria’s agreement to join the EU.
Let's not forget the visit in March of Bulgarian MP Rositsa Kirova, chairwoman of the Committee for Direct Citizen Participation and Interaction with Civil Society in the Bulgarian National Assembly. At a reception organized in Chisinau, in the presence of the Speaker of the Parliament, Igor Grosu, Kirova called for Taraclia to retain its status as a separate administrative unit, as the center of the Bulgarian community.
In other words, local elected officials of the Republic of Moldova asked a foreign state to condition their own country's European integration on the administrative map. And the government gave in.
The scenario is not new. In the 1998 reform, the districts were abolished and merged into counties, and Taraclia was attached to the new Cahul County. An illegal referendum followed in January 1999, then the boycott of the local elections in May, while local officials refused to vacate the positions abolished by the reform. After a discreet intervention by Bulgaria, the Parliament voted on October 22, 1999 to maintain Taraclia in its configuration. Taraclia County then functioned throughout the organization into counties, until the return to districts. It had an area of 674 km² and 45.600 inhabitants (in 2003), but it ended up on an equal footing with Cahul County, of about 2.400 km². For the simple fact that part of the population identifies differently, we found ourselves with an administrative unit three times smaller than its neighbor.
The model that had to be applied
If the Government believes that the south needs an urban pole with a special status, the logical answer exists and it is not Taraclia. It is Cahul, the largest city in the south, a university, economic and service center for an entire area. The model already exists: Chisinau and Balti are municipalities because they are real urban poles, not because they belong to a specific community. A municipality is justified by population, economy and administrative capacity. A municipality created as an identity enclave in a region that should otherwise function as a unit is not reform. It is the source of the next administrative chaos: duplicated services, overlapping competences and a southern region with a hole in the middle. The European gain invoked by the Prime Minister is not guaranteed either. A concession made to Sofia does not automatically buy the trust in the European project of a region that, since independence, has consistently voted the pro-Russian vector.
The Constitution already guarantees the protection of all ethnicities
The argument that only a separate statute can protect the identity of Bulgarians does not stand, because protection already exists, at the highest level. Article 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova starts from a fundamental principle: "The state is based on the unity of the people of the Republic of Moldova. The Republic of Moldova is the common and indivisible homeland of all its citizens"The same article adds, in paragraph (2), that "the state recognizes and guarantees the right of all citizens to preserve, develop and express their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity". In practice, the fundamental law already guarantees each community the right to preserve its language, culture and traditions, without the need for its own administrative unit. Identity is protected as a citizen's right, not as a privilege of a territory, and the hysteria about the loss of Bulgarian identity is unfounded.
Article 16 completes this framework through the principle of equality. According to paragraph (2), "all citizens of the Republic of Moldova are equal before the law and public authorities, without distinction of race, nationality, ethnic origin, language, religion, sex, opinion, political affiliation, wealth or social origin". In other words, the state cannot treat two citizens differently because one declares himself Romanian and the other Bulgarian. If equality works for people, it must also work for the territories in which they live: the administrative status of a locality cannot depend on the ethnic origin of those who inhabit it.
This is the legal basis that matters. The identity of Bulgarians in Moldova is preserved through schools, through culture, through language, and through the observance of these articles, not through administrative borders drawn by ethnicity.
Reduction ad absurdum
Let's take the Government's logic to the end. What if we made an ethnic feud, a municipality only for ethnic Ukrainians, in the north, where there are compact localities? One for ethnic Russians or one for ethnic Roma? It sounds absurd and it is absurd even in principle. But this is exactly the principle that we have just accepted. From the moment Taraclia receives a distinct status on identity grounds, any other compact community has a precedent that it can invoke. Even a neighboring state to which it can appeal. All that is needed is for someone to take the initiative unilaterally.
However, let's be fair to the Government. It could have been worse. It could, for example, have directly offered autonomy to Taraclia on an ethnic basis. Oh, wait, the Republic of Moldova already did that in 1994, only it granted it to the Gagauz minority. And it was not just an administrative concession, but a cession of sovereignty written in black and white. A cession that guaranteed the preservation of the Gagauz language and culture so "elegantly" that in the autonomy the Russian language dominates.
