The vote cast in national elections is the main instrument through which the people emanate their supreme power and delegate it to the sovereign state. The quality of the sovereign state and sovereignty as a whole depends on the quality of the vote. National and international actors made extremely alarming statements about the quality of the vote cast in last Sunday’s election. According to them, criminal groups supported by external forces threatened the fairness, integrity, quality of about 300,000 votes, and this is about 20% of the total votes cast. More precisely, about 20% of the sovereignty or power of the Moldovan state was attacked. The experts invited to IPN’s public debate “What is the “Shor phenomenon” based on?” discussed how justified these statements are and how real the dangers to which the state and citizens are exposed are.
Igor Boțan, the permanent expert of IPN’s project, said that a person can be said to be a phenomenon if they distinguish themselves by their talents and actions, whether positive or negative. As for the corruption of voters, the Criminal Code contains an article entitled “Electoral corruption”. It refers to the offering or giving of money, goods, services or other benefits in order to make an elector or supporter to exercise or not to exercise the right to vote in elections, including regional elections. These acts are punishable by a fine of 37,500 to 57,500 lei or by one to five years’ imprisonment, while the legal person is punished by a fine in the amount of 300,000 to 400,000 lei and ban on performing a particular activity or liquidation of the legal person.
At the same time, the Criminal Code stipulates penalties for the same action committed by electoral contestants, members of the initiative group, national observers, representatives of electoral contestants, trusted persons of election contestants or electoral officials.
“If we refer to mentality, this concerns the way of thinking of an individual or group. Here I think it is very important to talk about the mentality of the voters in the Republic of Moldova, who allow to be corrupted and involved into the affairs of organized criminal groups, as well as about the mentality at a broad social sector, taking into account the fact that Moldovan society came out of Soviet society, where there were proverbs saying that when it is offered to you for free, vinegar is also sweet, or there were people who liked to receive goods effortlessly,” explained Igor Boțan.
Rodica Pîrgari, an expert in monitoring the information space of WatchDog community, referred to President Maia Sandu’s assertion that there is evidence showing that the target of the criminal group was to buy 300,000 votes. “What we know at the moment is that the police, 10 days before election day, infirmed that they identified 130,000 people corrupted by the Shor criminal group. The police said they have evidence referring to these 130,000 people. Respectively, we do not know at this moment whether these 300,000 votes that Maia Sandu is talking about were really corrupted, bought or there was an intention. We don’t even know if this figure is higher because it could be even higher,” said Rodica Pîrgari.
According to the expert, there were localities where voting took place in an unnatural way, not as it is usually voted. “If we refer to Shor’s statements urging “to vote for anyone but Sandu”, this could also be true, but let’s not forget that the police also informed that before the election, he was to transmit the names of the people who the bought electors were to vote for. And taking into account his statement and the election results, we can really believe in what he said – vote for anyone but Sandu. But let’s not forget that he worked in regions and the people there voted for anyone they were told to, except Sandu. So, he had one message publicly and through internal networks he had another message,” said the WatchDog expert.
The president of the Center for Scientific Research in Psychology Ștefan Popov, a doctoral student in psychology, said that great emphasis is placed on the attempt to corrupt voters. “From a psychological point of view, this social category was prone to corruption anyway. The financial incentive was just a motivation to go out to vote. Ilan Shor’s statements were meant to induce fear in people first of all. Fear is one of the fundamental mechanisms and strategies of manipulation and propaganda. It goes to the threat of war, the threat of destruction of the nation and the state, etc. The point is that it is actually aimed at a certain audience.
“We can see that in practically all countries, there have always been two camps, two views. The same type of social debate is in the U.S., which is already a tradition between Republicans and Democrats. There are people with democratic and liberal views and people with conservative views and fear of change. Likewise, in this case, the Republicans place a lot of emphasis on fear, on the conspiracy theory and rely on exactly a certain type of population. If we are to be realistic, no matter how much we try to combat these phenomena, these camps will exist in practically all societies,” stated Stefan Popov.
According to him, this is observed year after year in all types of elections. “There is only one variation – a specific nuance from one year to another, depending on some problems, some contexts that the political leaders can use and influence a certain margin, a very small section. In this case, Ilan Shor banks on inducing fear, manipulating with a natural fear of people – the fear of change, as well as other narratives, such as LGBT propaganda,” said the president of the Center for Scientific Research in Psychology.
The public debate entitled “What is the “Shor phenomenon” based on?” was the 316th installment of IPN’s project “Developing political culture through public debates”. The project is implemented with support from the German Hanns Seidel Foundation.
