Even if the maneuvering space of the ruling party is narrowing at foreign level, in the limits of the national polices this still feels the master of the situation, political pundit Dionis Cenușa says in an analysis article for IPN.
According to the expert, the Democratic Party is decided to obtain maximum benefits based on the mixed electoral system introduced in 2017, both in single-member constituencies and under party lists. The larger is the number of seats of MP gained by the PDM, the safer will be its participation in governance.
While polls give the Democratic Party a low popular approval rating compared with other parties, the Democrats exploit the administrative resources and channel the investments from the foreign assistance towards evidently electoral purposes.
On the one hand, these intend to accelerate the pace of building critical infrastructure (roads, water supply and sewerage systems) with which they would persuade the potential voters. On the other hand, the Democratic Party wants to increase the loyalty of the administrative resources at the local level by practically doubling the salaries of employees of the local public administration.
These tendencies show that the political future of the Democrats will be decided at the local level, where the Socialists, who are for now loyal to the government, represent the only political competition, noted Dionis Cenușă.
According to him, how to ensure the legitimacy of the parliamentary elections so as to avoid post-electoral protests whose mobilization potential would destabilize the fragile balance that the Democrats try to maintain is the major problem of these.
On the one hand , the PDM does not want to abandon the possibility of obtaining as many seats of MP as possible. On the other hand, any good electoral performance can serve as a reason for generating major protests, especially if the representatives of the diaspora plan to return to the country to vote.
There are at least two recent precedents of protests that the authorities cannot ignore. First of all, it is about the long-term post-electoral protests in Armenia that resulted in the transfer of the executive into the hands of the minority opposition in Parliament. The anticorruption protests in Romania, where the participation by the diaspora was massive, is the second precedent that could bother the government.
Based on these examples, the government of Moldova realizes that neither the opposition nor other players (civil society, diaspora) can be underestimated, concluded the expert in political sciences.
