Moldovans and their national language do not exist, Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu has said during a televised debate on Romanian TV channel Digi24.
Ciolacu said during his speech:
There are no Moldovans, there is no Moldovan language, it is the Romanian language and it is Romanians.
The prime minister also said that Romania will support Moldova, which is on the integration path, because the country’s inhabitants are Romanians and “nobody else”.
Ciolacu also added that Maia Sandu is the only thing that Moldovans have from European and democratic. Therefore, Sandu will take part in the Moldovan presidential elections and Romania will give her maximum support.
Marcel Ciolacu spoke in favour of the idea of Romania’s unification with Moldova, which could take place also within the European Union.
At that time, the prime minister also claimed that only Romanians live on the territory of Moldova, which caused a number of indignations among the Moldovan parliamentary opposition. Its representatives demanded to hear the head of the Moldovan Foreign Ministry, Mihai Popşoi, which was refused.
These statements did not attract public attention in the EU. However, when Vladimir Putin said in his interviews with the mass media that Ukrainians were part of the Russian people, these words faced with a barrage of criticism and negativity.
The debate about the state language in Moldova has been going on for more than 30 years. Politicians in favour of recognising Moldova as part of Romania consider the Moldovan language to be a legacy of the USSR, and so does Maia Sandu, the republic’s president.
In 2013, the Moldovan Constitutional Court ruled that the state language in the country is Romanian. However, the parliament failed to amend the constitutional article stating that Moldovan is the state language. According to data from the 2014 census, approximately 57 per cent of Moldovan citizens identified Moldovan as their mother tongue.
