By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Apr 4 2009 (IPS)

Moldavians are heading for general elections this Sunday. After a campaign marred with illegalities, the incumbent Communist Party is confident of winning most seats in the national parliament.

Moldova is a post-Soviet state situated between Romania and Ukraine, with a population of 3.8 million. Even after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country has been run mostly by the Communist Party.

According to an opinion poll published Mar. 24 by the non-governmental Institute for Public Policies (IPP), the Communist Party (PCM) is expected to get over 30 percent of the vote. “PCM has a stable electorate – often from rural areas – whom they control very well. The Communists are not likely to lose their electorate, but they will not gain new voters either,” Viorel Cibotaru, IPP programmes manager told IPS.

The poll showed that about 23 percent of Moldavians do not know who they would vote for. This is the electorate that the opposition – which portrays itself as democratic and liberal – has been trying to capture in the last weeks of campaigning.

The three opposition parties credited with most chances of entering the parliament are the Liberal-Democrat Party (PDLM), the Liberal Party (PL) and Our Moldova Alliance (AMN). All three parties declare themselves pro- European. PDLM and PL propose a centre-right orientation, while AMN calls itself a social-liberal party.

The three parties might form a post-electoral alliance in order to defeat the Communists, but electoral laws prevented them from participating in the elections together. In April 2004, the Communist-dominated parliament prohibited pre-electoral alliances and lifted the electoral threshold for parties from 4 to 6 percent of the vote.

Moldova has a parliamentary system, in which the president is elected with at least three-fifths of the votes of parliamentarians (there are 101 deputies in total). Members of parliament are elected on the basis of a proportional system, from a national constituency.

PDLM seems to enjoy the support of many young people in cities. Olga Bailean, a political science graduate from capital Chisinau, told IPS that she sympathises with this party because of its “fresher” approach to campaigning. On Apr. 1, PDLM supporters organised a sit-in the square in front of the Moldovan parliament. Around 100 people put up four tents and carried banners with the message ‘Vote without fear’. The tents were later removed by policemen. The leader of the party, Vlad Filat, was injured during the confrontation with the police.

Ten days earlier, PDLM gathered about 30,000 people for a march against the Communist Party on the main boulevards of Chisinau. Just before the rally, a group of 50 students, citizens of Moldova studying in neighbouring Romania, had been prevented by the border police from entering the country. According to the students’ statements aired on private Moldavian TV channels, their documents were in order, but the suspicion they would attend the opposition rally led the authorities to stop them at the border.

Moldova has been a part in varying periods of both Romania and the Soviet Union through the 20th century and both Romania and Russia still have a say in Moldavian politics. Over the last years, the Voronin regime has become closer to Moscow, while the opposition parties are looking for support in Romania and the EU. Two-thirds of Moldova’s population is ethnically Romanian. Russians and Ukrainians each represent roughly 15 percent.

Attempting to contain Romanian influence over the result of the elections, Moldavian border police have prevented many Romanian citizens from crossing the border into Moldova. Two Romanian citizens, working as advisors to the opposition PDLM, were arrested Mar. 23 and charged with “causing inconvenience to their neighbours.”

“We were arrested forcefully, without being given any explanation, and kept in jail for fictive crimes,” Razvan Cazacu, one of the two Romanians arrested told IPS. “Our trial was an example of the police administering a judicial file, no prosecutor was present there. We believe the police knew the sentence from before the trial, otherwise we cannot explain why the corridors of the court hall were full of policemen ready to take us into custody right after the trial.” Cazacu added that it is impossible to speak about justice in such a trial and that the order to arrest and expel them from Moldova surely came from the government.

It is not only the opposition that accuses the Communist Party of illegally using state organs for electoral purposes. Petru Lucinschi, a member of the Moldavian Communist Party since Soviet times, former president of Moldova and once an ally of Vladimir Voronin, has recently spoken against the abuses of power by the governing party. “The way in which the Communists are making use of the police, judiciary and even of the Orthodox Church in order to stay in power is problematic,” Lucinschi declared. “It is threatening to the unity of our society.”

But the communists of today are not a continuation of the old party. “Voronin’s party is not a communist party,” says analyst Igor Botan. “Since their national convention in 2003, they have openly renounced the rhetoric of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they have embraced the ‘liberal revolution’.” President Voronin now declares that opening to foreign investment is key to the economic development of the country.

Many in Moldova still see the Communist Party as a guarantor of stability and social protection.

Botan believes that the idea of stability that the Communists are associated with is one of the most difficult points to tackle by an opposition which is not united. “The problem of the opposition is that they do not have a common strategy. It is easy to ask them: the Communist Party guarantees stability, what do you guarantee?”

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