The vice president of the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) Mihai Popșoi admits that the party’s popularity has been declining and blames such a development on the energy crisis and on the fact that the citizens had too big expectations of the government, but reforms cannot be done overnight. For his part, the leader of the Party of Change Ștefan Gligor said the citizens’ dissatisfaction with the current government was predictable as the power didn’t start solid reforms, but tried to conserve the old system taken over from the previous governments, IPN reports.
According to the last opinion poll published by IMAS, if snap parliamentary elections were held next Sunday, three political entities would enter the legislative body: the Bloc of Communists and Socialists, which would be voted by 27.9% of the electors; the Party of Action and Solidarity, with 27.2% of the vote, and the Political Party “Șor” with 12.1%. This way, PAS loses the lead in the people’s voting intentions. Representatives of the party said they anticipated such a development that is due to the multiple crises faced by the Republic of Moldova.
“We admit that it would have been strange if our score had grown in such circumstances. Vladimir Putin is the only regional leader whose rating goes up. The ratings of the other politicians in Europe have declined amid the current developments. The prices rise everywhere in Europe. The gas crisis also hit the largest part of Europe and almost all the governments were affected. The decline in trust after elections was predictable as we witnessed massive mobilization of the citizens at elections and this erosion is normal. The citizens had big expectations and we fueled these expectations by saying that things will change overnight, that the prosecutors and judges will become much more upright overnight. But this cannot happen overnight. However, if we follow the surveys and count each percentage point, we will not become engaged in complex reforms,” PAS vice president Mihai Popșoi stated in the talk show “Black Box” on TV8 channel.
The president of the Party of Change Ștefan Gligor said the ruling party’s abrupt decline in polls is due to the exaggerated expectations of the voters and to the government’s incapacity to meet these expectations. The government fails to manage the pandemic crisis and to do the justice sector reform.
“It’s true that PAS came to power in a difficult context. It came to power during an energy crisis that worsened the economic crisis and they made their mission even more difficult by the multiple promises they made to the citizens, related to the justice sector reform first of all. No change was seen in the management of the pandemic. What we saw was that the basis for structural, systemic reforms, primarily in the justice sector, wasn’t laid. The system was conserved and only temporary people were named, who just try to polish the reputation of all the institutions of the justice sector,” stated Ștefan Gligor.
The IMAS poll was carried out during January 24 - February 14 and covered a sample of 1,123 respondents. The face-to-face interviews were conducted in Romanian and Russian. The margin of sampling error is ±3%.
