The November 5 local elections showed that extensive discussion should be staged on political corruption, the responsibility of parties and of voters, and the efficiency of inspection institutions, Angela Kolatski, lecturer at the Department of Political and Administrative Sciences of the Moldova, stated in a public debate hosted by IPN.

According to her, the forms of this phenomenon are diverse and subtle and should be therefore analyzed accordingly. “The results of these elections show that a series of discussions should be held on the method of financing political parties, organization of inspections to see how political parties are financed, to what expect this control over the financing process during the electoral cycle, during these four years, should be kept and if this control mechanism should remain the duty of the CEC. A broad discussion is needed to see to what extent the CEC manages to envision particular situations as the work done by the illegal group Shor was sufficiently unpredictable,” stated the expert.

Angela Kolatski noted that the responsibility of the voter who accepts bribe in different forms should not be neglected. Moreover, efficient measures should be taken in this regard. “A lot of discussions are held about the financing of parties and contenders, political corruption. If fertile soil for electoral corruption hadn’t existed, this phenomenon wouldn’t have had such a scale. It goes to the fact that the voters, the ordinary citizens have been victims in the recent past. They do not bear responsibility for this, if only political as they, being corrupted, will choose a person or a party from the gray zone and this will not represent their interests and they will have to wait for one more electoral cycle. We are in the situation when we must have a very broad discussion so as to see what should be done with the voters who allow to be corrupted. They should also bear responsibility and a mechanism should be found for these to bear responsibility,” stated the lecturer.

She explained why coalitions that are diametrically opposed to those from Parliament are formed at the local level even if it goes to the representatives of the same party. “Why does this happen? Because the tasks in the management of public affairs at the local level and the relations that appear between councilors are of a different nature. They are personalized. These are people who know each other. Moreover, they can be related, but represent different political parties. We often witness situations when these coalitions appear, which in different periods were called monstrous,” noted Angela Kolatski.

The public debate entitled “Influence of acts of corruption on election process at local level” was staged by IPN as part of the project “Stimulation of discussion in the mass media about traditional particularities of local elections and the need for Europeanization” which is supported by Soros Foundation Moldova.