POLITICS-MOLDOVA: Communists Complete Comeback

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Apr 4 2001 (IPS) - Moldova’s Communist leader Vladimir Voronin Wednesday became the country’s third president since independence in 1991, capping an impressive comeback by the Communist party.

The party swept 71 of the 101 parliamentary seats in elections on Feb.. 27, a fact they acknowledged was a surprise to them, but which ensured that Veronin would be elected to the largely ceremonial post of president.

The president is chosen by parliament, not by popular vote, and Veronin Wednesday secured 71 parliamentary nods, while his closest rival, current prime minister Dumitru Braghis, could manage only 15 votes.

Voronin, 60, an ethnic Russian and a former director of a bakery turned Moldova’s minister of the interior during the Soviet era, masterminded the revival of the Communist party in 1993. He will be inaugurated on Saturday, Apr. 7.

The communists have ridden to power atop a wave of popular disillusionment with painful market reforms and mounting nostalgia for the perceived economic security of the Soviet era.

Moldova’s economy has shrunk by some 70 percent since independence in 1991. It is currently considered the poorest country in Europe. Most of its 4.5 million people survive on less than one dollar a day.

During his election campaign Veronin promised a referendum on whether Moldova should join the economic and political union involving Russia and Belarus.

Mircea Snegur, president from 1992 to 1996, and now leader of the pro-Western Party of Rebirth and Conciliation, has described the Communist comeback as a stark choice “between East and West”, between integration with Europe and a move back into Moscow’s orbit.

And Moldova’s outgoing president, a former Communist Party boss in the Soviet era turned centrist and nationalist, Petru Lucinschi, has argued that enough progress had been made for a Communist government to be unable to return to the country to its Communist past.

Earlier this week Russia and Belarus marked the fifth anniversary of their post-Soviet union, which was established when Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, signed the first of a series of agreements in April 1996.

Lukashenko had won his 1994 election on a platform of a rapid merger to boost the position of the two states. Under the accords, a joint currency is to be introduced by 2008. However, concrete ways to set up the union remain far from clear, while the merger is yet to produce any meaningful results.

Moreover, the “union” has been somewhat marred by an international scandal. On the day Lukashenko and current Russian President Vladimir Putin marked the union’s 5th anniversary, its top official, former Kremlin aide Pavel Borodin, was attending an extradition hearing in New York.

Borodin, the union’s secretary, was arrested in New York in January on a Swiss warrant on charges of money laundering in the course of the Kremlin’s renovation, which he managed as Russia’s property chief under Yeltsin. Borodin denies the charges.

Moreover, the union’s deputy secretary Sergei Kalashnikov has argued that it “does not need” Moldova, at least not before the country’s economy visibly improves.

Voronin has also promised to make Russian the second official language of Moldova, along with Romanian. The move is to help solve Trans- Dniester problem.

Some two-thirds of Moldovans are ethnic Romanians. The rest are Russian-speaking minorities. Russian was the only official language until the break up of the Soviet Union. And though almost the entire population can speak Russian, the language remains a divisive issue.

Trans-Dniester, a region of 700,000 people, most of them ethnic Slavs, and located in eastern Moldova, declared itself independent in 1990 fearing that Moldova, dominated by ethnic Romanians, would seek to reunite with neighbouring Romania, from which most of it was annexed in 1940.

Some 1,500 people died in a war in Trans-Dniester before Russian forces intervened and the fighting ended in 1992. About 2,500 Russian troops are still stationed in the separatist region.

Moldovan officials would like Trans-Dniester to remain a part of Moldova, but to be given some sort of special status. However, the leader of Trans-Dniester, Igor Smirnov is demanding a separate state.

But Trans-Dniester leaders have recently given some sign that they may be flexible on the issue of independence. They have said that they are ready to co-operate with Voronin and his government.