‘It’s like returning to the Wild West’ – Moldova seeks to attract back its lost citizens

As a result of mass emigration, Moldova is among the fastest-depopulating countries in the world. One in four Moldovans lives abroad. Consequently, the state is trying to entice its citizens back.

“Chișinău is a city of contrasts,” says Sasha, a young man in a baseball cap and beige jacket, with whom I chat over cigarettes and decaf coffee at the Casa Zemstvei community centre. His sentence sounds like a cliché, but as I stroll through the Moldovan capital of nearly three-quarters of a million people, I am reminded of it more than once.

Even in the city centre, there are low houses with wooden beams, often with handymen kneeling in front of them, hammer or paintbrush in hand. Wide avenues, where columns of cars and blue-and-white trolleybuses crawl, are lined with majestic Brutalist concrete structures and white limestone buildings adorned with Neoclassical reliefs. Yet, just a few blocks away, the grand boulevards are replaced by torn-up roads where, despite their dismal state, more cars are stubbornly parked.

It is late March and spring is forcing its way into the streets. In the numerous parks, still dominated by the bleakness of bare trees after winter, the joyful yellow of forsythia shines through. On the pavements, elderly women in floral headscarves stand by, attempting to sell bunches of daffodils, tiny cacti, or fresh green spring onions for a few lei. Nearby, the signs of spacious, glowing shops and posh cafés and restaurants – often labelled “European restaurant” on Google Maps – entice customers to enter.

“Does Chișinău feel like a European or a Soviet city to you? Last year, friends visited me here and said it felt European. I was so proud,” was a refrain I heard in several variations during my stay.

Between war and European integration

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the geopolitical situation has dominated Moldovan public debate. Many feared that if Ukraine fell, the next in line would be neighbouring Moldova, a country nearly twenty times smaller in size.

Although that did not happen, the war across the border affects the country directly. In mid-March, the government declared an emergency situation due to fuel contamination of the Dniester River following a Russian attack on a Ukrainian hydroelectric plant. Similarly, Moldova suffers from power outages as a result of Russian strikes on Ukrainian electrical infrastructure.

The European Union opened accession negotiations with Moldova in December 2023. While North Macedonia or Serbia have remained in candidate status for over a decade and their near-term accession is unlikely, the Moldovan government is hastily adopting EU-required reforms, hoping to conclude an accession treaty by 2030.

The European integration path was narrowly but ultimately confirmed in 2024 by two concurrent elections: a referendum on enshrining the promise of EU integration into the Moldovan constitution, and presidential elections in which Maia Sandu, from the ruling centre-right liberal Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS), was elected for a second consecutive term. And it was confirmed once again in 2025 when the PAS won parliamentary elections.

However, those elections would have turned out differently had it not been for the votes of the Moldovan diaspora, which today numbers approximately one million people.

Shortage of doctors and gravediggers

Moldova is among the fastest-depopulating nations in the world. While in 1991 the population was nearly four and a half million, today fewer than three million people live in the country. Every fifth child in the country grows up with only one parent, or even without parents at all.

“When someone dies, according to local tradition, eight men should dig the grave. But in some villages, you can hardly find eight adult men,” says sociologist and journalist Vitalie Sprînceană, illustrating the situation with a bitter anecdote. There is a lack of gravediggers, a lack of doctors; the population is ageing, and in the future, there might not be enough taxpayers to sustain low pensions and underfunded public services.

Moldova, which was hit by a severe and long-lasting economic crisis shortly after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, was long described as the poorest country in Europe. It remains among the poorest, although in terms of GDP per capita, war-torn Ukraine and Kosovo (whose independence is recognised by only about half of UN member states) currently fare worse.

Mass emigration for work began in the 1990s. Initially, it was primarily men, most often heading to Russia to work on construction sites – they could go there without a visa and spoke Russian. After the Russian financial crisis in 1998, the population began emigrating more toward the West, especially to Romania and Italy, where Moldovan women filled the growing demand for caregivers.

Initially, they had no choice but to cross borders illegally. This changed with Romania’s entry into the European Union in 2007, which triggered another mass wave of emigration. Romania allows the granting of citizenship to anyone who was a Romanian citizen before 1940 – when the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia (the territory of modern-day Moldova) – including descendants up to the third generation. Today, approximately one-third of the Moldovan population holds dual citizenship.

‘The best have left’

Another wave of emigration hit Moldova in 2014, fuelled by the introduction of visa-free travel to the EU and a widespread loss of faith following the ‘one billion’ corruption scandal. The masterminds of the fraud – in which one billion dollars was siphoned out of the Moldovan banking system – included EU sanctions listed oligarchs Ilan Shor and Vladimir Plahotniuc, as well as former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova, which took power in 2009 with the promise of leading the country out of poverty and into the EU.

At that time, the children of emigrants who had left at the turn of the millennium for precarious labour in the West were leaving in large numbers. Unlike their parents, they weren’t leaving just because of the country’s miserable economic condition, but also because of thwarted political hopes and the unsatisfactory state of public services.

“University education was a business at the time of my studies; diplomas were for sale. I had classmates who never showed up for classes and yet achieved the best grades,” explains Vlada Ciobanu in the austere white office of the Centre for Policies and Reforms, a civil society organisation focused on transparency and civic participation.

Ciobanu completed her bachelor’s degree at a Moldovan university and went to the UK for her master’s. “The question wasn’t if I should do it, but when. If you finished a bachelor’s in Moldova, it was almost essential to do a master’s abroad,” she adds.

As sociologist and migration expert Alexandr Makuhin confirms, emigrating back then was simply “normal”: “If you wanted to build a specific career, succeed in science, or work for a multinational corporation, you had no choice but to emigrate.”

Sprînceană explains that just as social networks began playing a growing role, parties whose main programme was swift EU integration came to power. Consequently, the Moldovan public debate on emigration shifted fundamentally.

“One of the dominant narratives is the claim that ‘the best have left’. There is a grain of truth in that: since the nineties, doctors, engineers, teachers, and scientists left to perform jobs in the West far below their qualifications. Until 2010, however, the word ‘diaspora’ wasn’t used at all; people simply spoke of Moldovan Gastarbeiters,” says Sprînceană.

In the 2010s, thanks to the increased influence of new technologies, part of the Moldovan diaspora began participating in domestic political affairs from afar. “They started commenting on the domestic situation, expressing anger, sadness, and joy over what was happening back home. And most importantly, they began participating in elections. The so-called pro-European forces realised that this was a huge electorate very loyal to parts of their programme. And they began targeting the diaspora in their campaigns,” Sprînceană continues. Hence, the narrative that “the best have left” also expresses the dissatisfaction of part of the elite with the domestic population.

In 2012, under the rhetorically pro-European government of Vlad Filat, the Diaspora Relations Bureau was created to strengthen ties between Moldovan emigrants and their homeland – and, crucially, to facilitate their return to the depopulating country if they desired it.

Gold rush

“Coming back to Moldova is like returning to the Wild West, like going to California during the Gold Rush. It is not easy at all. But now is the best time to come back. You have to work like a horse for a year or two, to prove yourself – and you’ll start making enough money for a life more comfortable than you would have in the United States or Europe,” Vlad Vedrașco, a 38-year-old man in a white shirt with blue stripes, tells me in a rush.

We are meeting in one of those “European restaurants” where he likes having breakfast. The prices are indeed European – for a large mineral water, a latte, an omelette, and roast beef bruschetta, we leave the equivalent of over 20 euros. This is in a country where the average salary is around 800 euros, and only a third of employees earn above-average wages.

Vedrașco, the son of winemakers and an economics graduate, emigrated to the United States in 2013 to pursue his “American Dream”. He says he inherited the “entrepreneurial gene” from his parents and, within two years, became a successful e-commerce businessman. “But spiritually I didn’t feel fulfilled; something inside me was empty. I think I was waiting for a reason to come back the whole time,” he recounts.

He found a reason to return in 2018, when his parents were no longer able to manage the winery. Today, he exports wine from his native village to the EU and shares his know-how with others in the industry. “I fulfilled my American dream in Moldova: I became a prosperous entrepreneur who positively affects the lives of others,” he declares, concluding the interview with a call to hesitant Moldovan emigrants to return as soon as possible, because in fifteen years it will be too late.

Building ‘European Moldova’ despite the labour shortage

The Moldovan state administration is actively trying to promote similar stories of successful returnees who “found gold” in their homeland to attract young professionals back. Most returnee programmes target small entrepreneurs, offering them tax breaks and grants.

In addition, the state attracts citizens from abroad by pointing to the opportunity to quickly and meaningfully influence domestic affairs and contribute to building a “modern European Moldova”. European grants are flowing into the country, the state needs people, and one can climb the career ladder in public administration quite quickly and easily.

It is no different in the civil sector. “If you want to do something in your community or get involved in civil society, you see results relatively quickly. Especially now, when city halls and the government are a bit more open than before. You experience the feeling that you matter and that your voice has weight here more than you would abroad,” Ciobanu confirms.

Ciobanu returned to the country in 2013, at a time when the decline of democracy due to high-level corruption under Vlad Filat was already evident.

“Everyone looked at me a bit weirdly. Returning from abroad was seen as a failure back then, as proof of a lack of courage. In the following three years, most of my friends left. Some claimed they would return when the country was in order, when there was more democracy. But who is going to make that happen?” she asks with a broad smile.

Better poor at home than rich abroad

However, salary conditions in the public and civil sectors remain unsatisfactory compared to the private sector. Especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, which caused an energy crisis and high inflation, Moldova has been borrowing from the International Monetary Fund, which requires “fiscal discipline” – meaning austerity – from its debtors.

On another sunny spring day, I am heading to a secondary transport school in southern Chișinău with Stela Crudu and her brother, the writer Dumitru, where Stela’s youngest daughter studies. Stela came to Chișinău today from her village in the north for a parent-teacher meeting. She has six children in total.

She was originally supposed to arrive at 10 am by bus. She finally arrives at noon by taxi because the bus simply never showed up. “She took out a loan and couldn’t keep up with the payments. She went to Italy to work as a caregiver. It took her two years to pay off the debts. For another three years, she tried to save some money, and after five years, she returned to our village,” Dumitru explains for his sister. Stela smiles brightly and carefully pronounces: “Milletrecento, millequattrocento euro.” As a caregiver in Italy, she earned about 1,300 or 1,400 euros a month.

Today, Stela works in a car factory in her village. “Quattrocento, cinquecento euro,” she adds. In the Moldovan factory, she earns roughly 400 or 500 euros. “But she says she’d rather be poor in her homeland than rich abroad. Besides, in our village, she can live in her own house and have animals,” Dumitru translates. Stela lists the animals she has: cows, horses, and two hamsters, one of whom is aggressive. “Morde,” Stela explains – it bites – and jokingly snaps her teeth.

While Stela attends the meeting, I talk to Alina, a French teacher who lived with her husband in Rome. This elegant woman in a red blazer remembers exactly how much time she spent in emigration: five years, eight months, and two days. “It was an opportunity to learn so many things; it opened my horizons! We integrated well… but in your native land, you breathe differently,” she says.

She enthusiastically describes how the Moldovan education system is moving forward and how proud she is to contribute to it thanks to her experience abroad. Then I ask about working conditions in public education.

“I am an optimist; I usually don’t complain; I always try to see every situation as an opportunity to fulfil my dreams,” Alina opens her answer humbly. “But… It’s true that the economic situation in public education is somewhat unfortunate. On the other hand, in private education, salaries are dignified; and therefore, motivated and creative people work there.”

Alina emphasises that the state should actively communicate with returnees and help everyone reintegrate – not just entrepreneurs. “I know people who returned, stayed here for two or three years, and then left abroad again,” she admits. A moment later I am sitting with Stela and her daughter on a café terrace in the park. The daughter repeats without hesitation that she will go abroad after graduation. She doesn’t know where or what for – she is 15, after all – but she wants to leave.

The vast majority will not return

As migration expert Makuhin confirms, a reversal of the emigration trend is not happening. Between 2020 and 2025, the country lost more than 200,000 people. Those who do return do so primarily for personal reasons. Many of those who left, conversely, already feel more strongly attached to their adopted country, by work, a house, a family.

“Government programmes aimed at the diaspora often focus on culture, trying to play on nostalgic feelings: you are Moldovan, come back to your country, we will welcome you here! It may sound cynical, but the most effective way to get the diaspora to return is economic support,” Makuhin concludes.

Ciobanu notes that people cannot be lured back simply by the promise of a good job: “We need better public transport, a social system, affordable housing – which is not talked about. Dorin Recean [the former Prime Minister] just stated that it is better not to intervene in the housing market, which contradicts the experience of other countries.”

When I ask Sprînceană what the government should do to attract lost citizens back, he answers with a question: “And do we really need it? The vast majority of Moldovan emigrants will never come back. There is no point in spending public resources trying to convince the inconvincible. Yes, Moldova needs people. But in so many regions of the world, life is much more difficult than here. For many people in the world, Moldova represents an attractive destination.”

A perfect country to unlearn and to deconstruct

I spend Saturday evening in Chișinău at the farewell party for the Casa Zemstvei community centre. It is the only place of its kind in the city. It used to host a Queer Café, screen independent films, hold lectures, or just provide a space for the shared joy of karaoke. Now, after 15 years, it is closing. The National Museum of Ethnography, which owns the building, reportedly wants to renovate the space and therefore did not extend the contract.

That evening, during the affectionate closing speeches, a short-haired woman with emigration experience takes the floor. “For me, after returning from Romania, Casa Zemstvei represented a place where I experienced so many magical things, where I reconnected with people, and where I fell in love,” she says movingly into the microphone.

At the end of a beautiful evening full of singing, dancing, and sharing, I find myself in the garden next to a dark-haired woman who is telling someone how, during her studies in Italy, no one initially wanted to supervise her thesis on anarchist governance in practice. “Everyone kept saying it was a utopia; they lacked imagination. We still have so much to unlearn, so much to deconstruct!”

I ask her why she returned from Italy. “What is there to do in Italy?” she replies. I return the question: “What is there to do in Moldova?” She doesn’t hesitate: “It is a very small and dynamic country. We are constantly building, reconstructing, destroying, and searching for something new. Moldova is the perfect country to unlearn and to deconstruct. Much better than the West.”

Author: Petra Dvořáková

The original article was published in Czech by Deník Referendum