Last Friday was the third time he was banned from Moldova. He was first declared persona non grata in May 2015 and then again in February 2016.
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| The leader of Actiunea 2012, George Simion, is taking a selfie at the Leuseni Moldovan custom, after the ban on August 28. Photo: Facebook |
Simion told BIRN that Moldova’s leaders “prefer to keep its citizens in Europe’s grey zone, where it can move from one dictator to another”.
To mark the centenary of Romania’s unification with Bessarabia [today’s Moldova] and Transylvania after World War I, Simion and his fellow activists organized a 1,300-kilometre march across Romania and Moldova.
It started in the “capital of the union”, Alba Iulia, in Romania, in July and was scheduled to end on September 1 in Chisinau.
But once the marchers reached the Moldovan border on August 26, only Moldovan passport-holders were allowed to enter, leaving the Romanians stranded for two days on the other side.
Reunion was a dead issue for decades while Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, from 1940 to independence in 1992.
But the topic has re-emerged since then, as Moldova’s relations with Russia fray, and since Romania joined the European Union.
The two peoples more or less share a language and a common Orthodox faith.
But while a number of Romanian and Moldovan politicians from various parties now support the unionist movement, the prospect of Moldova abandoning its independence and statehood obviously causes anxiety in Chisinau – and elsewhere.
Both Romanian and Moldovan officials are reluctant to discuss the matter seriously, fearing it will annoy Brussels and provoke Russia, which stations troops in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria.
Both countries also need to solve bigger problems, such as corruption.
“The re-unification idea exists more at the level of civic movements,” Chisinau-based political analyst Ion Tabarta told BIRN.
Dream resurfaces after independence:
Faced with a wave of refugees fleeing the civil war in Russia, and fearing the wider repercussions of the conflict between reds and whites in Russia, an assembly in Chisinau voted for union with Romania on March 27, 1918.
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| Unionists marching in Chisinau on September 1, 2018, led by Romanian MP Constantin Codreanu. Photo: EPA/Stringer |
However, Bessarabia, which had been a part of the Russian Empire since 1812, did not remain part of Romania for that long. The Soviet Union annexed it in 1940.
But after Moldova declared independence in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a strong current calling for reunion with Romania emerged in Chisinau.
However, that led to an armed conflict between Moldovan and pro-Russian separatist forces in the Transnistria region.
There, according to a 1989 census, 58 per cent of the population declared themselves Russian or Ukrainian.
The conflict remains unresolved, despite years of negotiations, and the separatists still fear that Romania will unite with Moldova one day.
The unionist movement in fact started in Moldova before the break-up of the Soviet Union, in 1988, with the formation of the Democratic Movement for Restructuring Support.
Several other parties later joined the cause, such as the People’s Front of Moldova, the Christian Democratic People’s Front, the Christian Democratic People’s Party and the National Liberal Party in Moldova, currently the main unionist faction in Chisinau.
However, while the first two movements gained the support of key intellectual figures in Moldova and Romania, the last two have been more of a disappointment to unionist voters – estimated to number between 10 and 15 per cent of the population.
When the Christian Democratic People’s Party voted in April 2005 to elect the communist Vladimir Voronin as Moldova’s president., it caused great dissatisfaction among unionist supporters.
Most of them turned to the Moldovan National Liberal Party. But analysts say the Liberals have in turn disappointed their voters with their corruption scandals.
Tabarta told BIRN that the failure of the unionist parties had discredited the idea, pushing it into a grey zone.
“It is obvious that in Moldova at this moment there is no unionist political project that will unite all the unionist electorate,” he said.
However, he said, there are still prominent unionists who did not adhere to any political platform and have not advanced the idea of union so far but “might do so in the future”.
Movement grows after protests of 2009:
Despite the lack of political credibility among the various unionist political factions, around 2010 the walls in both Bucharest and Chisinau started being covered with unionist graffiti.
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| Vice-president of Actiunea 2012 Iulia Modiga marching with other unionists supporters in a rally. Photo: Facebook/Tinerii Moldovei |
The message first read: “Bessarabia, Romanian land”. Over time, it morphed into, “Bessarabia is Romania.”
Vice-president of Actiunea 2012 Iulia Modiga says this was the movement’s rebranding. “We realized that it was not just about land,” she explained.
Modiga says the movement started to take form after protests in Chisinau in 2009 brought down Voronin’s communist government.
Pro-unionists then formed a civic group under the initial slogan “Bessarabia, Romanian land.”
In 2011, they established Actiunea 2012 and start raising funds and gathering volunteers for projects that brought Moldova and Romania closer together.
They took people from Moldova, including Russian-speakers, on trips to see the country that they could not learn much about from their Russian-language television programs.
They lobbied politicians to support the cause, brought together local officials from both states to start joint projects, donated books and refurbished some Romanian-language schools in Moldova.
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| Unionist gathering in Chisinau, on September 1, with the slogan „Basarabia e România!”. Photo: BIRN/Angela Barbaiani |
Modiga says all the Actiunea 2012 activists are volunteers and they all pay membership fees.
“Sometimes we even look back and we wonder at how we actually managed to gather all these funds and donations,” she says.
“People simply help us when we ask for help. We received a lot of support from people with the march from Alba Iulia to Chisinau, for instance. We were touched to see how people on the street would salute us and cheer us.”
Basescu missed chance to unite unionists:
Romania’s former President, Traian Basescu, also boosted the cause with his policy of giving Romanian citizenship to Moldovans who could prove they were descendants of Romanians living in Bessarabia who lost their citizenship in 1940.
The gesture made him one of the most popular Romanian politicians in Chisinau.
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| The ex-Romanian president Traian Basescu participating alongside the unionist at a protest on March 25, in Chisinau. Photo: Traian Basescu`s Facebook account |
According to statistics released in March, about one million of the 3.5 million people in Moldova have obtained Romanian citizenship in the past decade, many of them attracted by Romania’s EU membership, which allows them to work in the EU.
Some prominent politicians in Moldova also hold Romanian citizenship, including Prime Minister Pavel Filip and speaker of parliament, Andrian Candu, who is a graduate of the Babes Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca, Romania.
Romanian universities report a constant increase in the number of students from Moldova every year.
In May, Romania’s Education Ministry announced that Romanian universities would give places to over 6,000 students from Moldova in the 2018-2019 academic year.
Moreover, Moldovans who already have Romanian citizenship are not included in these numbers.
Following his second mandate as Romanian president, Basescu applied for Moldovan citizenship.
However, after getting it, Moldova’s pro-Russian President, Igor Dodon, who was elected in November 2016, had it revoked. Basescu sued the Moldovan President but lost the lawsuit.
Tabarta told BIRN that, despite corruption issues, Basescu was the only politician who could have gathered the unionist forces in Moldova under one banner.
“Basescu could have had a chance to unite this electorate, had he stayed above all the political projects and civic initiatives, but he did not,” Tabarta said.
Basescu now supports the National Unity Party, which has little chance of making it into Moldova’s parliament in elections due in 2019.
Progressives and reformists keep their distance:
Romania, meanwhile, on March 27 marched the centenary of union in 1918 with a special plenary session of parliament.
That took place two days after thousands joined a rally in support of reunion in Moldova’s capital, in which Romanian Liberal MPs took part.
Romania’s parliament also adopted a resolution supporting reunification with Moldova in principle.
Modiga says that her colleagues in Actiunea 2012 wrote two of the paragraphs of the resolution, because “the first draft did not say anything about the future and was only talking about the past”.
However, Moldovan and Romanian politicians are far from agreeing on exactly what they want – physical union or just closer cooperation.
Parliament speaker Candu told journalists that, alongside union at some point in the future, the two sides “want stone bridges and a highway to unite Chisinau and Bucharest.
“We cannot change history, but we can build roads and businesses together,” he added.
Moreover, Romania’s President, Klaus Iohannis refused to take part in the ceremonial plenary session, saying that the right path for Moldova was not reunion but pursuit of in its own European goals.
Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dancila said Romania and Moldova should unite – but in the “bosom of the European family.”
However, the number of Romanian politicians who support re-unification did appear to grow in 2018, especially amid the celebrations marking the 1918 unification.
Modiga says the number of Romanian MPs supporting re-unification is also bigger than it looks.
The volunteers have set up a “Friends of re-unification” group in Romania’s parliament, and she says that while some 130 Romanian MPs were in the group in the 2012-2016 legislature, the current parliament contains some 150 – out of a total of 465.
However, a problem for the unionists is that progressive parties in both Romania and Moldova are not that enthusiastic.
They say the priority is fighting corruption, even if they do not exclude the idea of union entirely.
Maia Sandu, leader of Moldova’s Action and Solidarity Platform, told BIRN that “regrettably, the unionist idea has been instrumentalised excessively by political factors that do not advance the welfare of the citizens of Moldova”.
She says many unionists also make the mistake of thinking that re-unification with Romania will solve Moldova’s problems.
In Romania, meanwhile, Save Romania Union MP Matei Dobrovie, who focuses on Romanian-Moldovan relations, agrees.
With its own poor corruption record, Romania cannot absorb a state with even worse levels of graft, he warns.
“Marches are not enough,” he told BIRN. “Moldova at the moment fosters an oasis of criminality – there was the theft of the billion [dollars from the banks] and other issues; you have Russian troops in Transnistria and the conflict there cannot be ignored.
“Imagine what it would mean, having Russian troops in a NATO country!” he points out.
Popular support grows steadily in 2018:
Despite the challenges, polls say support for the pro-union movement has grown steadily in both countries in 2018.
In Chisinau, while a poll in January by the Institute for Public Policy showed only 21 per cent of Moldovans would vote for reunion, in April, another poll by the Chisinau-based Sociology Reasearch Institute showed that 44 per cent would support re-union.
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| Moldovan students in Bucharest, Romania, cheering with the flags of both countries in their hands on November 14, 2016. Photo: EPA/Robert Ghement |
In Romania, growth was similar. A poll released in January by the CURS research institute showed that only 27 per cent of the respondents would vote for reunification.
But a poll from April-May showed that the percentage had jumped in only three months to 44 per cent.
Although it is a civic movement, Actiunea 2012 was involved in supporting former activist Constantin Codreanu, currently an MP in Romania, in running for the post of mayor of Chisinau in May 2018.
For this reason, Simion came under heavy criticism from pro-European forces in Moldova, who accused him of dividing the electorate and helping the ruling Democratic Party to win.
However, Simion argues that the Democratic Party was scared of the unionist potential, after about 20,000 people joined a unionist rally on March 25 in Chisinau – and after Romania’s parliament backed the resolution backing re-unification with Moldova on March 27.
Modiga believes that working at the grass roots and making borders irrelevant will eventually lead to re-unification, which she sees as an opportunity, not as a risk, as many politicians in Bucharest, Chisinau and Brussels fear.
“We think that despite the initial costs, reunification would eventually lead to a stronger country and a stronger EU,” she maintained.
However, beyond convincing politicians in Moldova and Romania to support the cause, pro-unification activists face a bigger challenge in Brussels, where politicians remain deeply unenthusiastic about border changes.
“The EU continues to recognise the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic of Moldova in its internationally recognised borders,” a European Commission spokesman told BIRN on Friday.
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