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Moldova - People

Nearly a third of Moldova's population has left over the past three decades, making the country one of the worst hit by the demographic decline seen throughout many parts of post-communist Europe. from 1991 to now, the population of the Republic of Moldova has decreased by almost 1.5 million people. The number of Moldovan citizens is now at 2.9 million - including citizens on the left bank of the Dniester, representing the breakaway Transnistria region, where there are just over 300,000 Moldovan citizens left.

Moldova is a small, underdeveloped, and heterogeneous country in southeastern Europe. Moldova is 14th in size among the 15 former Soviet states and 139th in the world. Its population is estimated by the National Statistical Bureau (NSB) to be 3,559,500 as of January 1, 2012 – 11th among the post-Soviet countries, above only Armenia and the three Baltic states. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Factbook pegs the current demographic trend in Moldova (-1.01/1000) as experiencing the third fastest decline in the world. Population is forecast to drop anywhere from 12 percent to 27 percent by 2050, taking no account of migration.

The current Republic of Moldova spans the Nistru River in the east and extends west to the Prut; the indigenous language of the bulk of the population here is a dialect of Romanian.3 This territory from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries was an agrarian vassal of the Ottoman Empire, after which it was annexed by the Russian Empire; it became a province of Greater Romania in 1918. In 1940, Moldova was forcibly incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a delayed consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. When it gained independence in 1991, the fledgling republic was landlocked and was the least urbanized and industrialized country in Europe, unsure of its identity, and lacking any modern experience of independent statehood or democracy.

Faced by low wages and a dearth of jobs, hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have “voted with their feet” by emigrating permanently or temporarily to Russia, Romania (which has issued passports to many), other European Union (EU) countries, and elsewhere. The exact numbers are a matter of controversy, but the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that in 2010 almost one-quarter of the economically active population was employed abroad; remittances accounted for approximately one-third of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and dwarfed foreign trade and investment.

Although net migration has flagged slightly, it still shows by far the biggest negative balance in Europe – estimated by the CIA to be - 10.02/1000. The effects on the Moldovan economy and the social fabric have been much studied: benefits in terms of poverty alleviation and costs in terms of depletion of human capital, a bias toward consumption, and neglect of children and the elderly. Politically, exit in such volumes is a safety valve for public dissatisfaction, but it also threatens the sense of involvement and citizenship that is integral to democracy.

Patterns of migration often cut across various aspects of inclusion, including language and gender: for example, Russian-speaking laborers more commonly seek work in Russia, while service-oriented women tend to seek opportunities in Western Europe. The most excluded populations within Moldova may be the most vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation, such as victims of domestic violence and children from the Roma community.

The number of working-age people outside the country leaves a large cohort of school-age children growing up in divided families, without the care of two parents present in the home. Under such conditions, children – particularly in rural areas without access to constructive extra-curricular activities – may be left vulnerable to truancy, poor academic performance, and at-risk behaviors. These risks may further undermine Moldova’s human capital should they lead to low confidence, weak labor skills, continued poverty, and migration later in life. While many children may be raised by grandparents, residents often dismissed such help as adequate solely for the simplest of needs. Few acknowledge the further challenge of how to care for aging parents whose children are abroad, with a tendency instead to view older populations in limited political terms as blinkered Communist voters, dwelling in the past and focused on pensions.

A traditional perception of women’s place in the home as wives and mothers continues to inhibit women’s ability to advance to higher levels of political participation, particularly when the electoral system remains organized around party lists; at the same time, women disproportionately occupy positions in the lower levels of public administration. Women’s relegation into lesser-paying roles is compounded by challenges such as sexual harassment on the part of superiors or lack of access to child care that would meet the needs of full-time working mothers. Domestic violence remains the most pressing concern with regard to women’s status, including a lack of understanding of its criminality.

Moldova is possibly the most politically competitive and culturally complex among the ex-communist states in Europe, outside the former Yugoslavia. Accordingly, its public life has been marked by dissensus over national identity instead of consensus. Strains over such questions have been recurrent but manageable since the early 1990s and, with the exception of the relatively brief separatist conflict in 1992, inter-communal violence has been largely absent.

According to the most recent census figures (2004), 22 percent of people in Moldova, with the exception of the Transnistrian separatist region, belong to minorities, two-thirds of them Ukrainians and Russians. If Transnistria is counted, that fraction goes up to 30 percent.12 One in four right-bank citizens are native speakers of a minority tongue and have something other than Moldovan/Romanian (usually Russian) as their language of first use. That ratio is more than one in three if Transnistria is factored in. Disagreements over education, language, history, and foreign relations are common. Minorities and Russophones are more apt to see merit in the Soviet period and favor a close relationship with Russia; ethnic Moldovans and Moldovan/Romanian speakers are more apt to be anti-communist and lean toward the EU and/or Romania. This is a society still wired with sensitive identity “buttons,” periodically pressed by players who more often than not are hunting for short-term political gains.

In 1994, the Gagauz minority was granted autonomous status in the region where its population is concentrated, along with the right to secede if Moldova ever renounces its independence (code language for reunification with Romania). On language, Article 13 of the Moldovan constitution “protects the right to preserve, develop, and use the Russian language and other languages spoken within the national territory.”

The most commonly conceived notion of inclusion in the Moldovan context concerns the status of the Russian minority, and in particular, the use of the Russian language. This assessment finds that these concerns more closely relate to consensus, and especially, to perennial debates on Soviet history and communist legacies, and a lack of agreement on what constitutes Moldovan identity. Language barriers persist – in daily communication between citizens and in larger contexts with regard to some public services. However, it is not necessarily the linguistic issues themselves, but rather the political significance with which they are infused, and the conflation of Russian with communist, that give the issue its staying power. A reductionist approach to ethnicity, language, and political affiliation further serves to obscure the possibility of separate concerns or interests of other minority groups – like Ukrainians and Bulgarians – which are either defined by use of their mother tongue or subsumed under Russophones.

Nationality, language, and cultural debates matter to most Moldovans, and there is a fundamental lack of consensus on these issues. However, in terms of intensity of feeling they matter to Moldovan elites far more than they do to the populace. In the April–May 2012 IPP barometer poll, a scant 2 percent of respondents volunteered interethnic relations as one of the three problems that most concerned them, putting it far below prices (68 percent), poverty (56 percent), unemployment (47 percent), and corruption (27 percent).