Former Romanian president calls for country reunification ministry

Former Romanian president Traian Băsescu, now a senator and also the president of the Popular Movement Party (PMP), suggested that the Government should establish a “country reunification ministry,” Agerpres reported. Băsescu argued that Romania should ask for the annulment of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, as this could work as a country project that would give Romania its dignity back. “We need to have an open policy, stated, just as Germany had an open, stated position of reunification. If [e.n. prime minister] Tudose is looking to restructure things, why does he not set up a country reunification ministry? With the part that means the Republic of Moldova. Nobody is speaking about the Romanians in the Ukraine or from elsewhere. A country reunification ministry that would promote the country reunification idea. We have this national dignity problem […] We live even today according to how things were decided by two criminals: Hitler and Stalin, through their foreign affairs ministers, with the despicable Ribbentrop-Molotov pact,” the former president said in a TV show. He also said he would support the Tudose government in case it decided to set up such a ministry. Băsescu also said he would initiate in the coming parliamentary session a document through which the Parliament expressed its wish to reunite the country with the Republic of Molodva. The PMP leader also expressed the wish that the union with the Republic of Moldova would be performed in less than ten years, given “how the unionist trend is evolving.” The former president has commented about a possible unification between Romania and the Republic of Moldova before. In 2014, he argued Romania should declare that Moldova was Romanian territory. Last year, Basescu said he was considering running in the parliamentary elections in the Republic of Moldova if he got his Moldovan citizenship back, after being lifted at the beginning of 2017. Romania is celebrating this year 100 years since the 1918 Great Union, when Basarabia, Bucovina and Transylvania joined Romania, made up of Moldova and Wallachia at the time. Following the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Romania was required to cede Basarabia to the Soviet Union, leading to the creation of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. editor@romania-insider.com