The initiative to exclude the silence day in elections is manipulative. The bill alludes to the fact that candidate Andrei Năstase campaigned on the day of the mayoral elections held in Chisinau municipality. Such an opinion was stated in the program “Expertise hour” on Jurnal TV channel, IPN reports.
Valeriu Pașa, expert of the WatchDog community, said the examination of the legislation through the angle of electoral agitation on the election day was done artificially and the provisions were amended to show to the development partners that the situation witnessed at the Chisinau mayoral elections will not repeat. The amendment is manipulative as the candidate didn’t actually campaign on the election day. He only urged the people to go and vote. “By this bill, they suggest that there was agitation on the election day and this is manipulation,” he stated.
Jurist of the Party of Socialists Fadei Nagacevski said the current provisions that ban electoral agitation on the election day generate unpredictability given that candidates in single-member constituencies will also be elected in the upcoming parliamentary elections and someone could easily stage a provocation to remove a particular candidate from the race or to have the results of a candidate annulled. “The electoral process should be maximally liberalized. Any restrictive norm generates unpredictability. Any norm that could somehow limit the human rights could be used to also produce anti-democratic effects,” stated the jurist.
Executive director of the Institute for Strategic Initiatives Vlad Kulminski said there is a particular political interest and the legal framework serves this interest. “The mayoral elections were annulled based on very unconvincing reasons. Do you think that if this legal norm hadn’t existed in the legislation, Mister Năstase would have been allowed to become mayor of Chisinau? I don’t think so. I consider another pretext would have been found to serve particular political interests. The political interest was for Mister Năstase not to become mayor of Chisinau as this is dangerous for the current government,” he stated.
On November 7, the Parliament’s legal commission for appointments and immunities approved a bill to amend an article of the Election Code and exclude the “silence day”, which is the day before the election day, when electoral agitation is banned. The problem appeared after the courts of law invalidated the Chisinau mayoral elections for the reason that the PPDA leader Andrei Năstase campaigned on the day when the law bans doing this.
