logo

“Congress of winners” or Parallels between Igor Dodon and Mahtama Gandhi. Op-Ed by Victor Pelin


https://www.ipn.md/en/congress-of-winners-or-parallels-between-igor-dodon-and-mahtama-gandhi-op-ed-by--7978_1086636.html

“The pretension of the ex-president of PSRM, Igor Dodon, to forge in stages the future victories of PSRM by Mahatma Gandhi’s scheme is just a bad joke…”
---


Igor Dodon and Mahatma Gandhi...

The 17th congress of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM) announced the party’s victory to be... The optimism derives from the citing of Mahatma Gandhi by the party’s leader Igor Dodon, who during his political career covered three similar stages, being: a) ignored; b) derided; c) engaged in bitter struggles. Logically, the fourth stage of Igor Dodon’s career should be similar to Mahtama Gandhi’s – culmination with victory laurels.

The leader of PSRM equates the stages of his biography with those of the biography of Mahatma Gandhi not accidentally. That’s why, in such circumstances, the stages of Igor Dodon’s political biography should be examined generally so as to convince ourselves that his pretensions are justified:

  • in 2005, at the age of only 30, Igor Dodon was found by the scouts of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) and promoted to the post of deputy minister of economy, then to the posts of minister and first deputy prime minister and later to the seat of MP on behalf of PCRM. Therefore, it is hard to realize when Mister Dodon was purportedly ignored. On the contrary, he was promoted not only by Moldovan high-ranking officials, but also by foreign ones. Vladimir Putin himself had pictures near Igor Dodon for the photo to be placed on a billboard at the parliamentary elections of 2014. Since then, Putin became a kind of idol owing to whom Dodon could relaunch his political career and whom he acclaims without sense;
  • in 2011, he broke the oath of allegiance to the PCRM, betraying the party that made him minister from stockbroker. It’s true that after betraying the PCRM, he was derided by former mates who labeled him a tester because he undertook to test the qualities of statehood supporter of the candidate of the Alliance for European Integration (AEI) for President. Evidently, the test was an absolute success that secured the extension of the AEI’s mandate for another seven years. In the period, they managed to: maximally exploit the Laundromat, devalue the banking system, concede the airport, etc;
  • the struggle into which he was engaged, which was invoked by Igor Dodon, actually was an act of imitation for him to be rewarded for his services of tester. The direct election of the President was arranged in 2014 through the manipulations of the Constitutional Court by order of the government’s executive coordinator Vlad Plahotniuc. The election of Igor Dodon as President in 2016 was also the masterwork of Plahotniuc, who used his own media holding and a contingent of Syrian emigrants to secure the victory of this. A proof of the fact that Vlad Plahotniuc was the mentor of Igor Dodon (see video) is the formal way in which the head of state addressed the one who captured the state at a time when this addressed Dodon in an informal way.

Of the aforementioned, we can draw the conclusion that Igor Dodon’s nerve to compare himself with Mahatma Gandhi is not only lack of modesty, but also a proof of unimaginable impertinence.

Overwhelming charm of Vladimir Putin’s jokes

The question is, why did the leader of PSRM venture to compare himself with Mahatma Gandhi? There is only one plausible answer – in order to imitate his benefactor, the President of Russia Vladimir Putin. The latter distinguished himself in 2007, before the G8 Summit, when he declared that after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, there is nobody to talk to. Ten years later, after the annexation of Crimea and the incitement to war in Donbas, Vladimir Putin said that he joked when he referred to the virtual dialogue with Mahatma Gandhi.

It clear that the leader of PSRM Igor Dodon joked a la Putin when he compared his own political career with that of Mahatma Gandhi. If he is so joking, Igor Dodon can try to say one more joke, imitating Mahatma Gandhi and writing to Vladimir Putin, in the context of the massive concentration of Russian troops at the border with Ukraine, asking him not to allow any war in the region as Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Hitler, in 1940, urging him to be responsible and to avoid the start of the war. In this connection, the leader of PSRM has a unique opportunity to make something to be at least slightly similar to Mahatma Gandhi. But we can bet that he will not risk doing this and will hide behind innocent jokes.

Another joke of the leader of PSRM is that at the 17th congress of the party, he spoke about the party’s past and future victories. It is noteworthy here that at the 17th congress of the Bolshevik Party of the USSR, there was proclaimed the Congress of winners that later was renamed the Congress of the shot ones as over half of the delegates there became victims of the Great Terror started in 1937. The comparison is not inappropriate as before the parliamentary elections of July 11, 2021, the leader of PSRM visited Alexandr Lukashenko, eulogizing him after this falsified the results of the presidential elections of August 2020 and harshly treated his political opoonents, establishing real terror in Belarus. In this connection, the leader of PSRM exclaimed – you gave an example to us! This is what sources of inspiration the leader of PSRM has while condemning the “yellow dictatorship” of their current government of the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS).

Conclusions

The 17th congress of PSRM that was held on December 18, 2021 was a big disappointment. It is not clear why the congress needed to be convoked. The congress didn’t analyze the causes of the resounding defeats of the party the past year – the loss of the presidential elections, parliamentary elections and municipal elections in the municipality of Bălți and the very modest score in the elections to the People’s Assembly of Gagauzia.

The ideological chaos inside the PSRM is the result of the imitation of the influential parties in Russia. During less than a year, PSRM changed three political programs – it renounced initially the program based on the social democracy doctrine and then renounced the program based on the social conservatism doctrine and now adopted a new program titled “Equity! Statehood! Development!”. The latter is for now kept secret. However, judging by the title, it is highly improbable that this will contain new, unused ideas that haven’t been discredited.

The congress of PSRM defined the party’s key taskthe unification of all the healthy political forces of society, which are ready to oppose the yellow dictatorship that is imposed and supported form outside. In this regard, PSRM sees the necessity of creating a national protest movement (NPM) that would unite all those who do not agree with the current regime and who are ready to oppose. This way, PSRM actuary responded affirmatively to Șor Party’s call to create the National Salvation Front (NSF).  

Regardless of the name of the future protest movement – NPM or NSF – this movement or front needs a powerful and credible leader. Ilan Șor is one of the main beneficiaries and executants of the billion theft. The leader of PCRM, 80-years-old Vladimir Voronin, is not suitable for the position of protest leader. This concedes what he has rather than he gains, as it happened in 2009. In such circumstances, it is hard to understand the PSRM congress’s decision to modify the status so as to eliminate the post of president of the party in favor of collective administration of an Executive Committee, by electing the secretary of this committee by rotation. The winners do not act like this. They do not dilute the responsibilities in the critical moments of the struggle on the national salvation fronts.

The pretension of the ex-president of PSRM, Igor Dodon, to forge in stages the future victories of PSRM by Mahatma Gandhi’s scheme is just a bad joke. We convinced ourselves that the stages of the political biographies of the two are cardinally different. Respectively, the last stage of the political biography of Mahatma Gandhi was to attain the status of national leader of India and a moral benchmark recognized all over the world. On the other hand, the last stage of Igor Dodon’s political biography is that of president of honor of PSRM. The drama resides in the fact that the given honor is marred by his betrayals and compromising compromises. In fact, there is no resemblance between Igor Dodon and Mahatma Gandhi. A proof is the fact that the last was a principled vegetarian, while the latter is an established carnivorous man who didn’t hesitate to become involved in the luring of journalists with tushonka.