The institution of independent candidate shall be ousted from the Moldovan law, since it is dead letter anyway, lawyer Mihai Corj told a news conference on January 20, Info-Prim Neo reports. “It is hard for someone, even for renowned personalities, to get beyond the threshold of 3%. And since there should be no dead norms in the law, the institution of the independent candidate shall be ousted,” Mihai Corj said. According to him, the principle of political pluralism provides for this institution. In case the Parliament decides to keep this institution, it has to decrease the electoral threshold to 1%, or to eliminate the electoral threshold. Another solution would be to grant parliamentarian seats to independent candidates according to a special ranking. According to Corj, “it is seen that the political parties do not like to have independent candidates as competitors. Many of them say this institution is but fiction, only creating a appearance of democracy.” Barrister Mihai Corj was an independent candidate in the 1998 parliamentary elections and got 0.7 % of the valid votes. No independent candidate having attended the parliamentary elections in 1994, 1998, 2001 and 2005 passed beyond the 3-per-cent threshold to enter the Parliament. Now the Electoral Code provides a 6-per-cent threshold for parties and bans the electoral blocs.