Parliament refutes setting election ad price for public broadcaster

The parliamentary majority rejected the proposal of the Democratic Party faction on Tuesday, February 3, to recommend the public television a price limit for a minute of electoral advertising, Info-Prim Neo reports. Leader of the Democratic Party Dumitru Diacov had come up with this proposal at Monday's parliamentary sitting, and he came with a draft law in this sense, on Tuesday, upon the speaker’s recommendation. Thus, the PD proposed the Parliament to recommend the public company “Teleradio Moldova” to set a price not more than 3 thousand lei per minute for electoral advertising. “That would be just, because we start a very intricate electoral campaign, people are poor and the governance must not challenge the financial impudence in Moldova,” Dumitru Diacov said. The Parliament said that this proposal enjoyed the support of media, as of some Communist deputies. “They agreed that, in a poor country, in the conditions when the state doesn’t finance the political parties, Teleradio Moldova asks for an extraordinary price for the electoral advertising and this thing causes political corruption in Moldova,” Diacov added. The draft law proposed by the PD was not supported by the Communist deputies, collecting only 29 votes of the opposition parliamentarians. According to Dumitru Diacov, the price for a minute of advertising at private televisions does not exceed 400 euros, but the public television asks for a price of over 600 euros per minute.