Political parties allowed to spend at most 12 M lei in race

The Moldovan political parties are allowed to spend at most 12 million lei, while the independent candidates – 500,000 lei in the race for the April 5 ballot. The limit was set Friday by the Central Election Commission (CEC), Info-Prim Neo reports. “The threshold has been increased, in comparison with the 2007 local elections, with the goal not to entice the parties to hide their expenses,” said the CEC chair Eugen Stirbu. He says 12 million lei is a reasonable sum, taking into account that in the previous parliamentary elections (2005), the electoral competitors spent 17 million lei all in all. He says the parties asked that the threshold should not be lower than 10 million lei. CEC member Victor Gafton proposed to set the limit at 16-17 million lei but his idea was rejected. Gafton argued that the prices have grown and the matter is not about public money. On the other hand , Valentin Vizant, a CEC member, has said the threshold is considerably higher than the one in the 2001 parliamentary elections, when it was 1 million lei and the one in 2005, when it was 2.5 million lei. “Setting the threshold is meant to create equal conditions for the electoral competitors, but not to favor the ones affording big expenses,” Vizant said. CEC secretary Iurie Ciocan said no party reached the limit during the last three ballots, and most of them hardly reached half of it. “It was 7.5 million in the 2007 local elections, and the parties which spent 4 million were champions,” he said. The CEC has established the amount of the loan for electoral competitors at 32,000 lei for parties and 5,000 lei for independent candidates. According to Eugen Stirbu, the figures were coordinated with the Finance Ministry, as it is public money. Stirbu has also remarked that no political party made use of this opportunity in all the elections since 2001. The loan was taken by two independent candidates in 2007. The CEC instituted the level-2 electoral constituencies in Moldova and established the number of trustees of candidates.