MAE party continues fighting for registration

Leader of the “European Action” Movement (MAE) Anatol Petrencu claims that the delay in registering the party is related to the inconvenience caused to the so-called “constructive opposition”. Petrencu has backed his statement, made Thursday, February 8 at a press conference, by saying that several party branches of PPCD have joined MAE, Info-Prim Neo reports. As MAE leader says, the Christian democrats are losing control of the situation, so that key figures of this party that hold offices in state bodies are interested in delaying the Movement’s registration, in order to impede MAE from participating in local elections. Petrencu specified that even though a long time has passed since the Ministry of Justice (MJ) refused to register the party, MJ failed to give a clear response regarding the grounds on which MAE was refused the registration. The pretext set forth by MJ, according to which 123 of 6639 signatures accompanying the application were forged, has no leg to stand on, because a political party can be registered with just 5,000 signatures. MAE leader says that the act of leaving the party unregistered violates not only Moldova’s Constitution and law, but also international treaties Moldova is party to. According to these documents, in case the court finds errors in the lists of parties’ members, these persons will not be taken into account when calculating the number of members and will be excluded from the lists of the party’s members, MAE representatives assert. At the same time, after eliminating the errors, the party has the right to submit another application for registration. As Petrencu states, during the last lawsuit in the Court of Appeals, Judge Mihai Ciugureanu was astounded to see that a part of the MAE members whose signatures were declared invalid, came to the court to refute the alleged forgery. Ciugureanu prohibited them from taking part in the suit and found no other reasonable argument for leaving MAE unregistered but to adjourn the court until February12, claiming that he had to get prepared for other lawsuits. Petrencu says that all the negative events occurred lately, including the buyout of the two municipal broadcasting stations are part of a chain of wrongdoings, committed by the communist government and their acolytes. Despite the impediments the party experiences, the number of its members continues to increase and reached 8,000 persons.