Who really won the elections? Info-Prim Neo analysis

The title question is especially tricky since at least three of the four political parties that made it into Parliament declare themselves to be the winners of the November 28, or at least claim to have a privileged position compared to the others. And it seems that, at this point in time, all of them are somehow right. It depends on whose perspective you are looking through. So, at this moment this question has two answers contradicting each other. I. As per the number of MP seats won in the future parliament, the winner is the Communist Party (PCRM), with 42. According to the traditions of the old democracies, the president of the country, or depending on the case, the monarch, should invite PCRM leader Vladimir Voronin and offer him the post of prime minister and the authority to form the Government, which in our case should perhaps be a coalition government. If the PCRM failed or refused to form the government, the task should have been relayed to Vlad Filat, whose Liberal Democratic Party (PLDM) won 32 seats, and then to the Democratic Party (PDM), with its 15 seats, and then to the Liberal Party (PL), with 12 seats. But Moldova doesn't have any king and no one can imagine a complying Mihai Ghimpu, the Liberal acting President, delivering the right to form the government to his arch-enemy Vladimir Voronin. This seems even more unlikely since the Constitution doesn't explicitly oblige Ghimpu to do this. It only says that the president nominates the candidate for prime minister, but it doesn't say on which criteria. The only thing the president must do before making the nomination is to “consult the parliamentary factions”. So, following this line of argument, the parliamentary hierarchy [PCRM → PLDM → PDM → PL] becomes invalid and should not be taken into account. II. Then the real hierarchy can be different. It is going to be determined by the actual post-election circumstances, in accordance with the country's own traditions and political culture, as well as with the Moldovan peculiarities, which have influenced the sociopolitical developments in the county for so many times. A more likely hierarchy could look like this: [PDM → PL → PLDM → PCRM]. This ranking of the political potential could determine to a decisive extent the creation of government coalitions (or the failure to create them), on the one hand, and the political color of the future coalition: center-left or center-right, on the other. Even if it has three times fewer seats than the PCRM and half the seats of the PLDM, [the Democratic Party] has a privileged position because neither the center-left coalition nor the center-right one can be formed without it. The PDM has many a time expressed its readiness to negotiate both with the left and the right to form a coalition in exchange for the best terms on offer. PDM leader Marian Lupu formulated this situation in rather ambitious terms: “The question is not who the PDM will follow, but who comes to the PDM”. Both the Communists, who can expect to have the leading role in forming a center-left coalition, and the Liberal-Democrats, who can be the core of a potential center-right alliance, will have to be quite generous when making their propositions for the Democrats, who will expect no less than a post of president, speaker or prime minister, or even a combination of these, which they otherwise don't really deserve, judging by the number of MP seats won. The second best in this odd hypothetical hierarchy is [the Liberal Party], even it has the fewest number of seats. The PLDM will not be able to form a center-right coalition without the PL, and for a center-left coalition the PL is ineligible by definition. In the next parliament, the PL could play the role of the “small log that can capsize the big chart”, as a Romanian saying goes. Mihai Ghimpu has “one more ace up his sleeve”, and that will be in this case the post of acting president, who is empowered to nominate, or not, the candidate for the prime minister. Everybody remembers Ghimpu's statement: “no one can make me dissolve Parliament”, and indeed he didn't dissolve it until he thought it was the right time. [The Liberal Democratic Party] has earned the largest number of seats on the center-right segment and consequently the right, but also the unofficial obligation to initiate talks on a coalition, to formulate offers for the potential partners: the PDM and the PL. This is a tough position, even unenviable, considering the priorities mentioned earlier. The PLDM will have the merit of being able to create the coalition and will enjoy the benefits of government if it succeeds, but also a great responsibility and burden if it fails. In fact, [the Communist Party] has only one possible partner to form a center-left coalition and, consequently, a very narrow room for maneuver to be able to use its potential in Parliament. This sole partner is the PDM, even if Vladimir Voronin speculated he could offer the PLDM a deal instead. And even if everything is possible in politics, especially in the Moldovan politics, a PCRM-PLDM seems very unlikely at the moment, for many reasons. Rather, this was a bluff intended for the Democrats to show them that Voronin was not willing to pay a very big price for their potential partnership. The worst thing is that neither coalition will own the required number of votes to elect the president (57 for the center-left and 59 for the center-right), in which case all the parliamentary parties will have to discuss with each other, to negotiate and, therefore, yield some of the political potential they earned in the November 28 election. So the answer to the question who won the elections in Moldova seems to be even more uncertain. [Valeriu Vasilca, Info-Prim Neo]