The vote of the electors who are abroad and the geopolitical component of the November 1 presidential elections are important and interdependent aspects. This interdependence is normal and logical in a globalized world, when the whereabouts of the person on the election day matter less than earlier, while for the Republic of Moldova probably counts less than for other states given the large number of citizens who left the country, most of the times forcedly. Aspects of the presidential elections in the diaspora and the geopolitical context were discussed by experts invited to the public debate “Presidential elections in the diaspora and geopolitics” that was staged by IPN News Agency.
IPN’s senior contributor Dionis Cenușa, a political scientist, researcher at the Institute of Political Sciences at Liebig-Justus University in Giessen, Germany, said the Republic of Moldova is a country that exports emigrants or, in other words, citizens of the Republic of Moldova who look for a job or a better life abroad. Under the electoral legislation, the elections organized by the Moldovan authorities for citizens who are abroad are related to voting abroad in general and no reference is made to the diaspora, but it is clear that those who will vote abroad will include the Moldovans who are classed as “the diaspora”. Not all the Moldovans who are abroad form part of “the diaspora”. That’s why voting abroad is organized not only for the diaspora, but this can surely vote. Voting abroad and the participation in elections matter because one third of Moldova’s population is abroad and this situation is unique. For this reason, the authorities should ensure the Moldovan citizens’ constitutional right to take part in elections.
According to Dionis Cenușa, the geopolitical component in Moldova’s case is evident because the country, at foreign policy level and at the level of orientation of migration flows, is divided into two. A part of the citizens left at the start of the 1990s, mostly to the Russian Federation, and some settled there and started families. Another part began to emigrate to the West, to the EU member states, in the 2000s. “Therefore, the geopolitical vote is extremely important for Moldova and this vote will probably play a crucial role in deciding the winner of the elections,” stated the expert.
Poland’s Ambassador to Moldova Bartłomiej Zdaniuk said that if a person is the citizen of a country, the place where this is on the election day does not matter as this has the right to vote. The fact that the person left the country does not mean that this lost the right to vote. At international level, the ensuring of this right is important as it is related to the recognition of elections as a process conducted in accordance with standards accepted by everyone.
According to the ambassador, if only the people from the country are allowed to vote, while those who left will not be allowed, someone could question the authenticity of the democratic process. “The main precondition is that we all form part of a state, community and the whereabouts do not matter. We have the right to take part in the life of this community,” stated Bartłomiej Zdaniuk.
Dorina Baltag, researcher in EU foreign policy and diplomacy at the London Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, who founded the community of Moldovans “Noroc Olanda” in 2012, said she went to another country because she was eager to know and to travel so as to discover more places and things. She is now in the Netherlands because she found an integration method suitable for her there. The right to vote belongs to the citizen and the citizen decides what to do with it. The Embassy of Moldova in the Netherlands appeared only in 2014 and a Moldovan before that had to look where to go to exercise this vote. “A trip of 100-200 km was to be made. Time and financial resources were needed for the purpose. It is a well-known situation”.
Dorina Baltag noted that since 2014 the Moldovans there can vote at Moldova’s Embassy in The Hague, but the distance that should be covered is of 250 km. The community of Moldovans there is rather small compared with other countries in Europe, but is rather active and helps the Embassy to form the electoral bureau. There are Moldovans who take part in the monitoring of voting. In society, they discuss what happens to the data that are collected by the CEC during the pre-registration process that has been used for several years and to what extent those data influence the opening of polling stations abroad.
The public debate “Presidential elections in the diaspora and geopolitics” was the 156th installment of the series “Developing political culture through public debates” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
