President Igor Dodon announced that he found the solution for thwarting the Democrats’ plan to introduce the uninominal voting system and proposed instead a mixed-member electoral system. The authors of a new Sic! article point to a number of discrepancies in the President’s statements, among which is the fact that he wants a Parliament with 71 MPs, 51 of whom will be elected based on party lists, while 50 by uninominal constituencies. “His math is as convincing as the rest of his arguments,” wrote the article authors.
The article says that the press also noticed inconsistencies in the President’s proposal. For example, Igor Dodon suggests that the students should be allowed to vote at the place where they study, based on a certificate issued by the education institution. However, in 2015, when the Liberal Democratic Party and the Liberal Party proposed an initiative that would have enabled the students to do so, namely Igor Dodon’s Socialists and the Communists voted against the inclusion of this subject in the agenda.
A bigger discrepancy mentioned by the article authors is the fact that despite the pretended resistence to the Democrats, Dodon’s proposal generally copies the proposal presented by Vlad Plahotniuc in Parliament in 2013. The only difference is that the mixed system of Dodon allocates constituencies for the diaspora and the Transnistrian region.
The authors of the article note the Democratic Party repeatedly showed that it enjoys bigger success at the local level than at the national one, while Dodon’s system, even if it is “just” mixed, offers the Democrats a considerable advantage against the current system. However, the President, after he enumerated these arguments against the uninominal voting system, which he calls “a crime against the Democratic system in the Republic of Moldova”, pretended that these do not yet apply, at least in the amount of 50%, to the mixed-member system.
The article says that Igor Dodon is as unconvincing as usual – either it is about the European Union or the Customs Union, the relations with Russia or the opposition towards Vladimir Plahotniuc, whose name he pronounces seldom after he was elected President, while his fifty-fifty proposal of the mixed system is a perfect illustration of his style of oscillating between two poles. The full article in the Romanian can be read on sic.md.
Sic! is a project implemented by IPN News Agency with support from the Soros Foundation Moldova.
