The Green Ecologist Party and the Party “Democratia Acasa” (“Democracy at Home”) put forward ten proposals for improving the bill on the electoral system change to be considered in the second reading following the debates held in Parliament.

Green Ecologist Party chairman Anatolie Prohnitski in a news conference at IPN said the bill should contain a provision about the formation of electoral constituencies according to the number of people with the right to vote, regardless of the boundaries of administrative units. There should be also envisioned the organization of the runoff vote.

“The constituencies should be established by the decision of Parliament, not of the Central Election Commission as this is to later deal with all the problems, but this is not correct. The CEC can provide informational support, while the decision to form constituencies should be taken by Parliament,” stated Anatolie Prohnitski.

“Democracy at Home” chairman Vasile Costiuc said the exclusion of the election threshold for parties and independent candidates is one of the requirements that could ensure equity between electoral contenders. At the same time, the election threshold for blocs should be maintained.

Another request is to exclude the necessity of collecting signatures by political parties. “The bill that was passed by Parliament in the first reading stipulates the necessity of collecting 600 to 1,000 signatures for each candidate. A party that has 50 candidates in 50 constituencies is obliged to collect by 1,000 signatures, which is 50,000 signatures in all. Only two or three parties will be able to collect so many signatures by using administrative, media and financial resources. The chances of the rest of the parties are minimal,” stated Vasile Costiuc.

Another request is to extend the period of registering candidates from 60 to 90 days. The parties also suggest excluding electoral publicity through posters, streets ads, newspapers, radio and TV because they consider these types of advertising are polluting, expensive and manipulating.

The two parties also insist on the introduction of the integrity records. “We have examples when ministers who worked for ten years only in state institutions after graduating from a university declared property worth millions of lei without hiding this. The question is how upright such a minister or an MP can be if they afford a car of 2 million lei?” asked he chairman of “Democracy at Home”.

Among the requests is to ban the modification of lists of candidates during the election campaign. According to the leader of the Green Ecologist Party, the election campaign is held once in four years and any political party has enough time to finalize the list of candidates.