The 30 July selection contest was won by S.C. “GRAFIC PRIM” S.R.L., with a project for marking and printing glass objects. At the newspaper's request, the zone administration disclosed the project's figures: a planned investment of 4 million lei and 16 new jobs.
On 16 July, Mayor Vitalie Vrabie received Nick Pietrowicz, the U.S. Embassy's Chargé d'Affaires a.i., who spoke about “commercial diplomacy” and Ungheni's potential. Beyond the protocol photo, America today means one concrete thing in Ungheni: a factory with American roots (Lear) in the free economic zone and a legacy of USAID projects — bus stops, a fire station, a courthouse — that came to a halt in 2025, when the agency was dismantled. A sober inventory: what is confirmed, what remains only a promise.
On Thursday, 25 June, a youth NGO and volunteers run a job fair for young people in Ungheni. The event lasts three hours; the problem it touches has lasted a decade. The number of 15–34-year-olds in the district has halved since 2014, wages are almost a fifth below the national average, and nearly a third of the region's young people are neither in school nor at work. And yet jobs do exist — the paradox that, in fact, tells the whole story.
