And the main question is not who exactly will manage the territory. The main question is how this territory should live in general.
A settlement is not just a point on an administrative map. It is not only a place where it is necessary to sweep the streets, turn on the lights, patch the roads, remove garbage and repair the roof of the school.
A territory is an economic system. It has a history, specialization, labor market, infrastructure, resources, constraints and its own logic of survival or development.
That is why local elections are more important than they appear. Formally, they determine who will run the mayor’s office. In reality, each time they raise a much more serious question: whether the territory will remain an object of service or become a subject of development again.
These questions are so important that we decided to start a series of articles to show the depth of the problem.
We are not starting this cycle because Moldova has few strategies, concepts and reforms. On the contrary – there are too many of them. They live a separate life, multiply in offices, look beautiful in presentations and almost never answer a simple question: how should a territory live if people have left it, its economic function has disappeared and the local government has turned into a deficit administrator?
Three Moldovans
Moldova today lives in a strange stratification. There is a strategy of regional development. There is an administrative-territorial reform. There is a real country – with empty villages, an overburdened Chisinau, weak districts, mayors looking for transfers, and territories that increasingly exist not as economic organisms but as administrative shells.
These three Moldovans – strategic, reformist, and real – often live each with a life of its own.
On paper, the state recognizes the problem. The National Strategy for Regional Development explicitly records a monopolistic model: Chisinau concentrates population, money, jobs, management decisions and added value. The gross regional product per capita in the capital is almost five times higher than regional indicators. The country lacks dynamic medium-sized cities, small settlements are losing economic functions, and demographic decline only reinforces this dependence.
But then administrative-territorial reform begins – and the main conversation shifts back to form. How many districts to keep? How many mayoralties should be enlarged? What should be the minimum size of an administrative unit? How to reduce management costs? How to increase the capacity of local authorities?
All these are important questions. But they are secondary if the main question is not asked: what economic function should the territory perform after the reform?
It is possible to merge mayoralties, reduce districts, redistribute taxes, change boundaries, rewrite powers. But if the territory does not understand what it will live at the expense of, the new administrative form risks becoming an old problem in a larger package.
That is why we decided to write this cycle.
Not as a political program. Not as an order. Not as a campaign in support of someone. But as an attempt to calmly and objectively formulate where a real administrative-territorial reform should begin, if it is to be a development reform at all, and not just another redrawing of the map.
The power of petition
We believe that the current logic of the reform is ill-conceived, poorly tied to the real Moldova, and in this form can not so much solve the problem, as preserve it in a new package.
The question is not only what problems we have. The question is how many more years we will live inside this story and pretend that another enlargement, renaming or transfer of powers will create development by itself.
After thirty years of weak, fragmented and often impotent territorial development policy, it is time to recognize the obvious: a territory does not develop because it has a mayor, a council, a budget and a strategy. It develops when it has an economic function.
In Moldova, the opposite is too often the case. Responsibilities are passed down to the local level, but no real levers are passed down. The mayor is responsible to the people for the road, the water, the school, the garbage, the lights, the young people who leave and the businesses that do not come.
But tax policy is determined by the center. Major investment decisions are made outside the territory. Government programs are shaped in ministries. Donor money follows its own logic. Export channels are controlled by external markets.
And the local government remains face-to-face with the population and the budget, which is often only enough to maintain vital activities.
This is how a special type of local government appears – not the power of development, but the power of intercession.
The mayor becomes not an architect of the future, but a manager of the deficit. His success is measured not by what new economic function the territory has received, but by how much money he was able to bring from the outside. He got a transfer – well done. He got a project – well done. Achieved repair – well done.
All this is really necessary: people need a road, water, a school roof, sewerage, lighting. But if there is no economic engine behind it, the territory remains in the same dependence. Just with a new road to the old problem.
Territories without development
The figures confirm this. According to the concept of the local public administration reform, the own revenues of small mayoralties account for about 11% of their budget, while 50-60% of resources come from the state budget. More than 87% of mayoralties have less than 3000 inhabitants. Only 53 mayoralties exceed 5,000 inhabitants, 63 are between 3,000 and 5,000, and 776 are less than 3,000. Small mayoralties on average spend about 30% of their budget on administrative costs, and 80.5% of them do not have project management specialists.
This means not just a lack of money. It means a weak ability of the territory to turn money into development.
But the problem is even deeper. Moldova is not a homogeneous space. The suburbs of Chisinau, the agrarian village in the north, the southern municipality, the former industrial city and the border area are different economic organisms. They have different demographics, different labor markets, different infrastructure, different connectivity, different perspectives. And the state machine too often offers them a one-size-fits-all recipe.
The 2024 census figures make this problem visible. In ten years, the country’s population has fallen by 13.6% – from 2.7 million to 2.4 million. But this is the average temperature of the hospital. Chisinau grew by 16.7% over the same period – to 720,000 inhabitants, almost a third of the country’s population. The South region lost 26% of its inhabitants, the North – 23.4%. In Ocnita, Leova, Briceni and Cantemir districts, the loss exceeded 28-29%. The loss of population was recorded in all districts without exception.
This is not just demography. It is a map of which territories the country is losing the fastest. And it is a question of whether the state has an answer to this loss beyond transfers, grants and beautiful strategies.
Today, the state is talking about amalgamation, about a minimum threshold of 3,000 residents, about reducing the number of districts, about increasing administrative capacity. Local councils have already made hundreds of voluntary consolidation decisions. But administrative consolidation alone does not answer the question of what will happen to the economy of these territories.
The mayor of a depressed northern district and the mayor of a Chisinau suburb may formally have similar powers. But they solve different tasks. One works in a zone of demographic decline, outflow of people, weak tax base and disappeared production function. The other works in the zone of capital expansion, land demand, migration inflow and proximity to the labor market.
To give them the same tools is to pretend that the country is simpler than it is.
Therefore, local governance reform should not be reduced to arithmetic: how many mayoralties to keep, how many districts to reduce, how much money to pass down. The main question is different: what territories does the country want to have in 10-15 years?
Manufacturing? Agrarian and processing? Logistical? Suburban? Tourist? University? Industrial? Or just administratively serviced?
If a territory does not understand its own economic function, the amount of authority ceases to be the main issue. It is impossible to effectively manage something for which no purpose has been defined.
That is why in this cycle we will talk not about how to redraw the map nicely, but about how to return the function to the territories. Not about how many mayoralties to keep, but about what they should live off of. Not how to distribute poverty between levels of government, but how to make the territory produce work, income, services and a future again.
Comrat as a mirror of Moldovan problems
In order not to turn the conversation into a boring theory, we chose one concrete example – Comrat.
Comrat is neither an accident nor a political gesture. It is the capital of Moldova’s only autonomy, a city with a special status, a university, an administrative role, an agrarian base, a history of recycling, and at the same time – with a typical set of problems of the Moldovan periphery.
That is why Comrat is convenient as a mirror. It shows contradictions typical not only for Gagauzia, but also for the whole country: status without economic motor, powers without sufficient resource base, roads without development, education without labor market, agrarian potential without deep processing, local government without real instruments of growth.
We are not in contact with the administration of Gagauzia and we are not writing this cycle as a political project. This is our personal choice and our professional vision. Comrat is not chosen because it is “for” or “against” someone. It was chosen because its example shows particularly well: the administrative form itself does not create economic content.
The eight chapters of this cycle will be organized around eight functional issues of territorial development. Each chapter will conclude with a case study of Comrat – not as an embellishment, but as a test of the general idea on a specific territory.
We will talk about the fact that the territory does not start anew after each reform. About the fact that self-governance without an independent economy turns into dependency management. That a road can be an instrument of development, but can become a corridor of outflow. That a depressed area is not just a poor area, but an area that has lost its ability to reproduce people, businesses and jobs. About why a mayor often becomes a deficit manager rather than a development leader. About why each territory needs its own scenario, not a universal administrative pill. About why the periphery is not a distance from the capital, but a position within economic flows. And why digitalization does not replace the economy.
Necessary discussion
This is not a political cycle for us. It is an attempt to bring back into the conversation about local elections and administrative reform something that has been chronically missing from it – a conversation about the function of territory.
Local elections are not just about choosing people. It is a choice about the future space in which those people will have to live. And if the country again reduces this conversation to names, parties, ratings and borders, it will again miss the point.
Moldova needs more than just governance reform. It needs a functional map of development. For each territory it is necessary to understand not only the population and budget, but also the structure of employment, sources of added value, dependence on transfers, migration outflow, raw material base, remnants of industrial infrastructure, processing capabilities, transportation links, access to markets, educational resources and real investment constraints.
The administrative map answers the question of who governs the territory. The economic map answers the question of how the territory lives.
It is possible to have a correct administrative map and a dead economic map. You can have a perfect distribution of powers between the center, the district and the mayor’s office, but if the territory does not produce sufficient added value, it will still depend on transfers, migration, trade, state employees and money sent from abroad.
This is why local elections are more important than they seem. Because behind them is not only a change of names in mayoralties. Behind them is the question: whether Moldova will remain a country of living territories or will finally turn into a few centers of attraction and a large periphery, which exists on transfers, migration, grants and people’s patience.
We do not claim to be the truth in the last instance. But we certainly don’t want to pretend that what is happening is normal. If a country cannot answer for thirty years why it needs its own territories, someone has to start this conversation without diplomatic makeup.
This cycle is our attempt to start it.
Yevgeny Perestoronin, journalist, economic and political analyst
Dmitri Tereburke, economist, expert in real estate and territorial development
