The persons aged between 40 and 70 are the most active voters, while the women traditionally go to vote in a more disciplined way than the men. “The young public, which showed impressive political and social activism in 2009, namely because that wave of activism brought nothing good, remains almost indifferent to what will happen in the upcoming elections and massively votes with the legs – leave the parental home, leave the sisters and brothers, take the children and go to other corners of the world,” political commentator Olga Nicolenco stated for IPN.
She noted that now the general/political culture and its influence on the vote are on different sides of the border. On the one hand, a lot of persons with good general culture aren’t here, while there they will not necessarily have to go to vote. Also, many of those who go to vote here do not necessarily have a good general culture. At the same time, the geopolitical, doctrinaire and any other views will not influence the final vote one way or another because these elections will be massively rigged.
“The vote is already rigged! I want to remind you that the election campaign hasn’t yet started officially, but the ruling politicians already travel through villages, trying to disguise the election campaign by all kinds of caravans and populist projects. It is regrettable, but I must ascertain that the political class of Chisinau, with big ‘success’, manages to put into practice Communist-Stalinist laws: it is not important who votes; it is important who counts the votes,” stated the political commentator.
Olga Nicolenco said the situation is better as regards informing, compared with ten years ago, for example. Even if not in the same volume as in the town/capital city, the largest part of the rural population can also inform themselves. Worse is the situation concerning the capacity to discern. The choice is usually made by intuition or based on comparison. “Things do not stand well in both of these regards. We do not really have intuition (political, electoral, social, collective, etc.) that is based on knowledge/experience accumulated by the people, state because we have existed as a state and people ‘independently’ for only 25 years. We also cannot use comparison in the moment of choice as, regrettably, we didn’t have efficient governments, valuable leaders, veritable democratic development to make an objective comparison so as to correctly discern in the end,” she stated.
According to Olga Nicolenco, the voter in the Republic of Moldova is vulnerable and it cannot be otherwise. “After the 25 years, the state, with an insistence that is worth a more noble cause, impoverished us, humiliated us, robbed us and led us to exodus. It now can bribe anyone with anything – a post, a fraudulent business, a vacation or a broom handle,” she said.
As to the voting tendencies, the political commentator said it is hard to make a comparison with the last elections, taking into account the fact that we had local elections in 2015 and now we have presidential elections. We can yet find similarities if we imagine that we choose a mayor for the country. It’s yet definite that the wish to vote is low for a number of reasons: not all the parties fielded candidates; the hopes for a real change faded away together with the snow of 2015 and nothing new sprang from under the snow, if only the old political mud.
Olga Nicolenco also said that the results of the elections do not depend on the profile of the voter and, regretfully, this profile does not matter for the final vote, unlike the whims and desire of the ruling politicians. “Not we will choose this time. It is the government that will ‘pick’ the fruit that perfectly fits the criminal ruling team,” concluded the commentator.
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The article forms part of the IPN series “Profile of the voter: who votes the President”.
