1. Fundamental objectives

The strategic objectives of the political program of the Christian Democratic People’s Party (CDPP) for the following four years are the following:

1. Fight of corruption and delinquency
2. Alleviation of poverty
3. Creation of conditions to ensure a sustainable economic development
4. Support of agricultural producers and the middle class
5. Strengthen and improve the public administration system
6. Integration in the regional and European economic system.

A rapid, consequent and coherent promotion of reforms is necessary to attain the proposed objectives and alleviate the profound crisis provoked by previous governments. CDPP shall adopt and implement economic and social policies to ensure conditions for a stable economic growth and a sustained improvement of the quality of life.

2. Social Programs

Over the past decade the population’s standard of living has decreased continuously. The real value of population’s income is now ten times lower than it used to be. 75% of citizens live under the poverty line. The discrepancy between the earnings of poor and rich families grew as much as 21.5 times, salary gaps — by 8 times; the lowest wages are now paid in the social sphere. The average wage covers only 40% of the basic consumption needs. Unemployment is rampant and has exceeded 200,000. Over 600,000 Moldovans have left abroad. The difficult life conditions, deficient medical services and improper nourishment have led to an increased incidence of illnesses and death rate. The pension system is unjust, the pension value does not cover the minimum existence expenses and the system of nominative compensations is more of a symbolic one and does not protect the socially vulnerable population. Corruption, smuggling and organized crime have reached more than threatening extents.

2.1 Fight of corruption

Corruption is a recognized vice of the public sector most seriously affecting developing countries. It has affected various levels of public administration in Moldova. Prevention and fighting of corruption are current urges that the CDPP shall work toward by:

• Establishing efficient legal, institutional and managerial mechanisms supported by an adequate legal framework and the observation of legal norms
• Creating the Ministry of Defense of the Motherland by merging all power structures and making them more professional and efficient
• Passing the General Prosecution Office under the subordination of the Justice Ministry
• Consolidating the Department for Fighting Organized Crime and Corruption by granting it additional powers and developing a steering mechanism of its activity
• Improving the legal and institutional cadre for the activity of public authorities and the adoption and execution of judicial rulings
• Creating a mechanism to protect the small and medium business from the corrupt elements from the public administration and the organized crime
• Ensuring decent wages for public officers of all levels
• Improving and optimizing the system of financial and fiscal record keeping
• Ensuring Moldova’s association with the Council of Europe instituted group of states engaged in the fight of corruption.

2.2 Alleviation of Poverty

CDPP’s policy of alleviation of the current social disaster and the improvement of the standard of living shall be directed towards:

• Improving the legislative and normative framework to ensure universal access to a minimum set of state guaranteed social services.
• Creating a solidarity fund for allowances for the socially vulnerable segments of population — unemployed, old people, children, invalids, families with mean earnings.
• Working towards reducing the gap of incomes of various social categories and developing a middle class as a pillar for social cohesion.
• Implementing a youth program, including bank loans for students and pupils from families with small incomes; building special lodging facilities for young families.

2.3 Educational System

Given the key role of education in the development of the society, CDPP deems education the national priority and proposes the following measures to revive the education system:

• Allotting at least 7% of GDP for education
• Harmonization, synchronization, integration and unification of the Romanian system of education
• Increasing the quota of public expenditure on education, centralized funding of state education institutions, paying teachers a wage equivalent with the minimum consumption basket
• Introducing religion as a taught subject in schools
• Assigning the Russian language the status of foreign language to be studied as an optional language in public schools; derussification of the education of national minorities and support of education in the mother tongue of national minorities
• Creating an efficient, objective and honest system of evaluation to exclude cases of corruption from education institutions
• Supporting research centers and developing various forms of ownership.

2.4 Public Health Security

Creation of a viable system of health protection shall be a permanent concern of the CDPP in this field and shall be achieved by:

• Allotting at least 7% of GDP for the public health sector
• Ensuring a guaranteed minimum of medical assistance corresponding with the population’s vital needs; paying wages to the medical personnel financed by the state according to the type of labor and the minimum consumption basket
• Implementing a flexible system of prevention of diseases by establishing a modern medical infrastructure
• Funding by the state of the medical science and medical education, training national medical personnel according to modern requirements
• Encouraging establishment of religious facilities at or near hospital institutions, facilitating spiritual assistance for patients
• Promoting and implementing the system of mandatory health insurance
• Implementing nationwide programs promoting a healthy way of life
• Intensifying the fight against phenomena hazardous for public health (drug addition, prostitution)

2.5 Protection and Social Assistance

Measures to attenuate the social costs of the economic reform shall be taken in the social protection system as follows:

• Full payment of current pensions and drafting a program of paying debts in an established period of time
• Indexation of pensions and budget salaries according to the inflation rate
• Strengthening the private sector of voluntary insurance with supplementary pensions
• Creating and efficient and just mechanism for delivery of services of nominative social assistance so that the allotted resources be directed toward socially vulnerable categories of population
• Encouraging economic agents to create new jobs and retain the existing ones by granting credits and subsidies
• Support by the state (credit guarantees, refunded interest, fiscal facilities) of individuals able to work to organize their own activites
• Initiating and applying an emergency program for reintegration into labor of dismissed personnel.

2.6 Development of culture

CDPP deems culture the expression of national identity and pleads for the maintenance and development of the cultural environment and access to the cultural heritage. For this purpose, CDPP shall:

• Promote national cultural values meant to rehabilitate the national dignity and cultivate the aspirations of Moldovan citizens for Romanian and European integration
• Support economic agents who sponsor cultural events
• Cultivate adequate attitudes to preserve and restore cultural and art objects and preserve the national cultural patrimony
• Recognize and guarantee the right of national minorities to learn the official language and the culture of the majority population, which would allow them to fully integrate into the society.

2.7 Environment Protection

In the field of environment protection, the following steps shall be taken:

• Establishing and applying at the national level of some norms and laws to ensure obligatory inclusion of environmental issues in the social, economic and political decision making
• Encouraging ecologically pure production and technological processes without a negative impact on the environment
• Attracting investments to create enterprises of collection, selection, processing and depositing household and industrial waste.

3. Macroeconomic policies

GDP has dropped continuously over the past decade and constituted in 2000 about 38% of its level back in 1990. The considerable fluctuation of inflation, the pronounced devaluation of the national currency against the US dollar, the “dolarization” of the economy (deposits in dollars account for 35% of the monetary mass), frequent bankruptcy of banks caused a significant share of monetary mass to circulate outside the bank system. The current fiscal and budget system is characterized by superdimension, lack of clarity and predictability and does not stimulate the economic development.

3.1 The Monetary and Financial Policy

CDPP shall strive that the Government in cooperation with the National Bank of Moldova promotes a monetary and financial policy based of the following principles:

• Adjusting thew monetary policy to the structural reforms in all branches of economy
• Promoting a protectionist currency course aimed at increasing the competitiveness of local commodities
• Ensuring respect of all rules of the game by the currency market agents to prevent currency smuggling and the discrepancy between the reference and the actual rates
• Taking into account the impact over the exchange rate of the Moldovan Leu when completing the currency reserves by acquisitions from the internal market.

3.2 The Fiscal and Budgetary Policy

CDPP shall promote a fiscal policy to encourage economic development, create new jobs, improve the business environment and favor the entrepreneur spirit. Income policy shall be based on the “4S” formula:

• Simplicity, i.e. it should be clear for all tax payers, accountants, managers and fiscal inspectors
• Stability, i.e. it may not be changed, at least not during the budget year
• Selectivity, i.e. facilities shall be granted only to priority branches and activities generating income to the budget
• Sanctioning, i.e. sanctioning evasion by any means from tax payment. Policy in the field of budget expenditure shall be oriented toward:
• Reforming and upkeeping the bodies maintaining public order
• Reforming and upkeeping the judicial system
• Upkeeping the state secondary education
• Ensuring the minimum guaranteed medical assistance
• Ensuring decent conditions of existence for the socially vulnerable categories of population (pensioners, invalids).

4. Structural Reforms

Industrial production in 2000 constituted 1/3 of the 1990 level, whereas agricultural production dropped by 50% over the same period. More than 2/3 of industrial enterprises are either bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy.

4.1 Objectives

CDPP shall take a series of measures to recover the real economy and aim to:

• Stop the decline of production and recover the economy by an actual implementation of reforms in industry, agriculture and tertiary sector
• Encourage competition in all fields of activity to enhance quality of production and reduce costs
• Ensure with power resources and maintain a saturated power supply of the economy and the population.

4.2 Ownership Reform

In the ownership reform, the CDPP shall promote the principles of equal treatments of the state and private ownership as well as guarantee the private ownership as the foundation for social welfare. Ownership reform shall be carried out with maximum transparency and correctness and the traffic of influence over the results of privatization shall be prevented. CDPP shall do the following:

• Ensure the transparency of the privatization process, reveal and counteract illicit state property privatization
• Speed up the process of privatization of the telecommunication sector and the enterprises from the tobacco and wine industries, finalize the privatization of enterprises from the power sector
• Increasing the responsibility of managers of state enterprises and state representatives in joint stock companies for the results of their activity
• Restore the historic right to the ownership of which citizens had been deprived during the Soviet period, by applying direct and indirect methods of compensation based on granting facilities in the privatization process, pensioning, living standard improvement.

4.3 Recovery of the Industrial potential

The industrial potential and competitiveness of local goods on the domestic and foreign markets shall be recovered by stimulating enterprise restructuring and ensuring a favorable economic environment. CDPP shall focus on the following:

• Speeding up the enterprise restructuring process and supporting them for a definite period of time
• Assessing the state enterprise restructuring process and correcting the negative effects generated by the measures applied
• Introducing facilities to stimulate production for export and the export itself, particularly by cutting in half the income tax on exported goods and industrial services
• Extending facilities on income tax to enterprises which reinvest their profits in technology and developing capacity in sectors showing market security

4.4 Supporting agricultural sector

PPCD will concentrate on:

• Exempting agricultural producers from the land tax for the next 4 years;
• Encouraging cooperation between industrial beneficiaries and agricultural producers in view of capitalizing the products;
• Supporting development of agricultural services infrastructure, including through foreign technical assistance;
• Developing system of economic activities funding in the rural areas by extending the activity of credit and loan associations, small agricultural producers’ credit cooperatives, supporting entrepreneurs investing in rural area, implementing other efficient mechanisms of supporting and funding agricultural producers;
• Promoting a favorable fiscal policy for importing equipment, tools and machinery;
• Studying external legal framework in view of obtaining additional benefits for domestic exporters.

4.5 Developing the infrastructure

PPCD policy will concentrate on:

• Attracting private investments for communal services provision;
• Developing and implementing a sustainable development plan for localities;
• Reviving transport infrastructure, integrating it in the international communication network;
• Reorganizing railways system by eliminating inefficient sectors.

4.6 Ensuring energetic security

It is necessary to take urgent measures to make the sector more efficient and to reduce energy consumption, namely:

• Ensuring energetic sector viability by connecting to the neighborhood countries’ networks;
• Increasing energetic sector managers’ responsibility for the technical and commercial loses of energetic resources, levying all the arrears for electricity consumption;
• Promoting energetic sector development strategy based on ensuring energetic security; diversifying energy and fuel sources, developing country’s own capacity to produce electricity, including via foreign investments.

4.7 Consolidation of the middle class

PPCD sees middle class as the guarantee of the sustainable development. In this respect PPCD will promote:

• Implementing a legal framework favorable for re-launching small business;
• Simplifying administrative procedures which would minimize public administration bureaucracy;
• Supporting programs aimed to develop entrepreneurial skills among unemployed and young people;
• Fostering business development infrastructure: consulting centers, research companies and those implementing new technologies in economy; leasing companies; credit and insurance mutual associations, etc.

5. Reforming public sector

Previous governments have created a multi-dimensional, bureaucratic and corrupted public administration. The existence of three state structures: Chisinau, Comrat and Tiraspol, permanent diminishing of the state property, deliberate bankruptcy of major state and private enterprises, enormous foreign debts — are only few of the outcomes of the inefficient former governance.

5.1 Objectives

In the public sector, PPCD has the following objectives:

• Consolidating the activity of public administration bodies and making it more efficient;
• Establishing efficient liaison between central and local public administration, by decentralizing decision-makers’ competencies and responsibilities;
• Fighting and preventing corruption and organized crime.

5.2 Economy

PPCD considers that to ensure a favorable environment for economic development the state role should resume to:

1. Establishing an adequate social-economic environment by defining a set of clear rules, regulations and norms for the economy functioning. These are to be binding for all the market players.
2. State will interfere in economy only to stimulate economic development in the poorly financed areas such as: social and state security; public order, foreign policy, justice, public administration, education and culture, health care, research and science, and environment. This interference will be achieved via specialized governmental structures whose number will be significantly reduced. In addition, customer care office and competition office will be established.
3. State redistribution of the incomes through fiscal and budgetary policy, reduction of fiscal burden, establishing clear priorities for budgetary spending.

5.3 Central Administration

PPCD will implement its political program through its representatives in Parliament and Government by supporting:

• Legislation responding to the needs occurred during the governing period;
• Efficient liaison between Parliament, Government and Presidency;
• Introduction of PPCD structure in view of reducing number of ministries, reducing budgetary spending, increased responsibility of public administration bodies;
• Increased state bodies professionalism in protecting citizens’ rights and interests, as well as those of the state;
• Supervision of the activity or public administration at all the levels;
• Delegating to local public administration competencies which could be better implemented at the local level.

5.4 Local administration

PPCD activity in this domain will be oriented towards:

• Improving legal framework and mechanisms to ensure a real autonomy of local public administration bodies;
• Continuing the reform of the local public administration in view of administrative-territorial reform, allowing all the communities able to administrate local autonomy structures to establish mayoralties;
• Transferring local public patrimony into the administration of local bodies;
• Ensuring an efficient training system aimed to increase public officers’ professionalism;
• Remodeling public services system, transferring some of the activities into the private sector;
• Allotting sufficient financial resources proportional to the competencies and responsibilities of the local, municipal and county councils;
• Abolishing administrative guardianship over local public administration bodies and only supervising the way local public administration bodies observe the law.

5.5 Territorial integrity

In view or re-establishing territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova, PPCD will intensify its efforts at the international level to facilitate resolution of the Nistru conflict. To facilitate negotiation process over the status of the region, assistance of the Romania, Russian Federation, Ukraine as well as international organizations such as OSCE and European Council will be sought.

6. Foreign Policy

6.1 Objectives

The following would be the main objectives in the foreign policy:

• Republic of Moldova’s integration in the European Union;
• More active efforts in adhering to the regional associative process;
• Establishing bilateral relations in view of diversifying the market for domestic products and services;
• Diversifying economic contacts with would be investor countries.

6.2 European integration

The strategic objective of the foreign policy would be integration in the European Union. In this respect it is necessary to:

• Bring Republic of Moldova’s laws in accordance with EU countries legislation, in compliance with the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement;
• Start negotiations on Republic of Moldova’s adhesion to EU;
• Strengthen political, economic and cultural cooperation with EU member states;
• Negotiate favorable visa regime for the citizens of the Republic of Moldova;
• Efficiently use the assistance and cooperation programs;
• Open access to sources of funding and investment.

PPCD will promote the strategy of establishing a common economic space with Romania and simultaneous integration in the European economic system. Currently, the first state is being implemented — Governments of the Republic of Moldova and Romania have signed agreements on free trade, economic cooperation in different sectors of mutual interest. PPCD will foster economic integration through:

• Intensifying sector cooperation, specifically in the areas of energy and communications (developing communication and transportation networks).
• Stimulating liaison between entrepreneurs (creating Moldovan-Romanian joint ventures, simplifying registration procedures, granting fiscal benefits).
• Jointly selling and promoting export goods and raw materials imports on the third markets (through Romania in and from Europe, Middle East, North Africa; through Moldova in and from NIS); abolishing fee and non-fee restrictions in mutual commercial exchanges.

Creating a joint customs union and developing relevant legislation will favor the promotion of Romanian nations in the third countries. Establishing a common customs union will be the foundation of a common market characterized by liberalized traffic of goods and free circulation of the labor force, services and capital.

PPCD will take all the necessary steps to maximally benefit of the favorable geographic location of the Republic of Moldova both to the East-West and North-South directions.

6.3 Bilateral and regional cooperation

Republic of Moldova’s bilateral relations with other countries will rely on programs to meet economic and political interests on a short, medium and long term basis. PPCD will promote:

• Economic, social, cultural and spiritual integration with Romania;
• Denunciation of the documents on Republic of Moldova’s adhesion to CIS, developing bilateral relations with those countries;
• Friendly relations with Russia and Ukraine;
• Establishing and promoting contacts with USA and EU;
• Regional cooperation programs with neighborhood countries and countries of the Black see region.

In promoting cooperation with international financial institutions, PPCD will support:

• Negotiating and implementing measures provided for in the Memorandum on the Economic Policy within the International Monetary Fund Enlarged Crediting Mechanisms;
• Increasing the efficiency of the World Bank projects;
• Reevaluating cooperation strategy with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development;
• Enhancing the cooperation with international financial institutions such as: International Financial Corporation, International Fund for Agricultural Development, Social Development Fund, diversifying and finding new sources of concession external funding.

As a member of the Christian-Democratic International and as a partner of the European Popular Party, holding the majority in the Brussels European Parliament, PPCD will employ all available means to promote the interests of the population and the image of the Republic of Moldova.

Slogans

Listen to your heart!
A government with clean hands: we don’t divide the thieves into our and theirs!
Vote usefully!

 

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