Parliamentary elections will take place in Moldova on November 30. Some of the political parties have already started, officially or not, electoral actions, while some haven't. IPN Agency set out to sketch the “portraits” of political parties as recorded by society's perception, before the official start of the electoral campaign. We consider this to be a useful exercise for Moldovan voters, who will gain additional and concentrated information that they may find useful on the day of elections, and also for the parties themselves, who will get some hints on how to improve their image. This portrait might also help to better understand what one or another Moldovan party wants to be and what it really is. To this goal, many experts have been asked to comment on the parties’ chance to make it into the next Parliament, the way they fulfilled their previous electoral promises, the possible coalitions, topics, tactics and strategies they might employ to get the voters’ attention.
Within the campaign carried out during three weeks, there were published 17 articles about 17 parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties that are considered as the most active in the political life of the country. There were also analyzed the portraits of parties that were registered recently or were not yet registered, but that have attracted public interest. In Moldova there are 39 political parties. One party has recently submitted the documents needed to be registered.
According to the opinions stated by experts in the 17 articles, the future Parliament will have the same composition as the legislative body elected in 2010. Thus, the following parties will enter the legislature after the November 30 elections: the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Party, and the Liberal Party.
The experts do not anticipate the creation of blocs before the elections, including because the election threshold is too high in this case. Most of the parties do not have many chances to poll enough votes to pass the election threshold individually. However, some of the experts consider that if the parties that form the current government coalition, plus the Liberal Party, created an election bloc, they would manage to obtain more seats than they hold know in Parliament and could even secure an extended majority and would be thus able to amend the Constitution.
The experts do not think that the number of voters of the Communist Party decreased significantly even if a number of members defected from it and now this party also faces an internal conflict. The experts also named parties or projects that seem to pursue the goal of destabilizing the situation in the country, being most probably fueled from outside.
Most of the 22 parties that weren’t analyzed within the campaign were described as inactive also by the specialized website www.e-democracy.md. For the same reasons, the largest part of the experts could say nothing about the given parties. They stated only that it is practically impossible for one of them to cause surprises in the November elections, even if there are parties with history among them.
The author of the campaign aimed to discuss with a higher number of experts so as to avoid the biased or unilateral opinions. A part of the articles contain fewer opinions for the simple reason that some of the experts were unable to say something about the examined parties. After the articles were published, two parties had an angry reaction, while one party reacted painfully, accusing the experts who stated their opinions and IPN Agency of political bias. For its part, IPN reacted by re-publishing the accusations on its website, accompanied by an own communiqué with the common title “Recidivist Vitalia Pavlicenco”.
IPN thanks for participation in this democratic exercise politologist and electoral strategist Olga Nicolenco, vice director of the Institute of Legal and Political Research of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova Victor Juc, political analyst Nicolae Negru, deputy head of the Institute for Political Analysis and Consultancy “Politicon” Ion Tabarta, and expert in politology Denis Cenusa.
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As part of this campaign, IPN has already published a review of the experts' opinions on the Communists' Party, the Liberal-Democratic Party, the Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, the Liberal Reformists Party, the Renaissance Party, the Socialists' Party, the Democratic Action Party, the National Liberal Party, the Antimafia People's Movement , the People's Party, the Green Ecologist Party, the Party of Regions of Moldova, the Party “Democratia Acasa” (Democracy at Home)., the People’s Force Party, the Communist Reformist Party of Moldova and the Party of Renato Usatyi.
Mariana Galben, IPN
