The number of deputies will be reduced from 101 to 61 and the citizens will have the opportunity to annul the mandates of the deputies if they are dissapointed.

This proposal belongs to PDM and it was discussed today at the weekly session of the party.

Vlad Plahotniuc, the chairman of the party highlighted that PDM prepared a referendum on this topic. 

"Another topic discussed today is the political reform that we promised at the Congress of the Democratic Party in 2016, when I was elected president of this party.

Then, in 2016, I quote from my speech, that the political reform in the Republic of Moldova involves the optimization of the Parliament and the Government, the real transmission of the control over the Parliament in the hands of the people and the identification of the levers by which citizens can sanction those who do not do their jobs during their mandate.

We have already started the optimization of the Government and so we want to do with the Parliament.

We will discuss about our initiatives with the citizens, and if people support them, we will consult with the experts, the Venice Commission, to find the most appropriate form of implementation.

The Democratic Party's first proposal to optimize Parliament in the political reform is to reduce the number of deputies from 101 to 61 deputies. As with the executive power reform, when we reduced the number of ministries and eliminated more institutions, we think that a well-structured and organized Parliament will become more efficient, the MPs will be more responsible and their work will be easier supervised.

The second proposal of the Democratic Party makes the citizens control the MPs, namely - that citizens withdraw the mandates of deputies when they have disappointed them.

We have avoided the initiation of a referendum on these issues, firstly, because we wanted to avoid spending public money, and secondly because the presence in the referendums is generally very low and we risk getting a contestable result that does not would reflect the opinion of the majority of citizens in the Republic of Moldova. However, with the parliamentary elections of February 24, 2019, there is an opportune moment to hold such a referendum at the same time as parliamentary elections, without spending extra money and having the certainty of a high turnout, because the presence at the ballot box is usually high.

So today, the Democratic Party have prepared an initiative to organize and hold a consultative referendum on the above political reform points along with the parliamentary elections of February 24, 2019, and we are sure that it will help us to make further decisions in Parliament, where PDM will be present by making that political reform that we promised, "said PDM chairman Vlad Plahotniuc.